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KARL

MARX

FREDERICK

ENGELS

Collected

Works

°§§°

Wume 5

Marx and Engds
1845-1847

Contents

Preface XIII

KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS
WORKS

April 1845-April 1847

Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach [Original version] 3

Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach [Edited by Engels] 6

Frederick Engels. Feuerbach j i

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. A Reply to Bruno Bauer’s Anti-

Critique 15

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Critique of
Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach,

B. Bauer and Stimer, and of German Socialism According to Its Various
Prophets . 19

Volume I. Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its
Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stimer 21

Preface ... 23

I. Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks 27

[1] 27

[l.J Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular 28

[2. Premises of the Materialist Conception of History] .. 31

[3. Production and Intercourse. Division of Labour and Forms of

Property — Tribal, Ancient, Feudal] 32

[4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History. Social Being

and Social Consciousness] , 35

[II] 38

[ 1 . Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man] 38

[2. Feuerbach’s Contemplative and Inconsistent Materialism] 38

Contents

[3. Primary Historical Relations, or the Basic Aspects of Social Activity:
Production of the Means of Subsistence, Production of New Needs,
Reproduction of Men (the Family), Social Intercourse, Conscious-
ness] 41

[4. Social Division of Labour and Its Consequences: Private Property, the

State, “Estrangement” of Social Activity] 46

[5. Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of

Communism] 48

[6. Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History: History as a
Continuous Process, History as Becoming World History, the Necessi-
ty of Communist Revolution] 50

[7. Summary of the Materialist Conception of History] 53

[8. The Inconsistency of the Idealist Conception of History in General

and of German post-Hegelian Philosophy in Particular] 55

[9. Idealist Conception of History and Feuerbach’s Quasi-

Communism] 57

[III] 59

[1. The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas. How the Hegelian Conception

of the Domination of the Spirit in History Arose] 59

[IV] 63

[ 1 . Instruments of Production and Forms of Property] 63

[2. The Division of Material and Mental Labour. Separation of Town and

Country. The Guild-System] 64

[3. Further Division of Labour. Separation of Commerce and Industry.

Division of Labour between the Various Towns. Manufacture] 66

[4. Most Extensive Division of Labour. Large-Scale Industry] 72

[5. The Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of

Intercourse as the Basis of Social Revolution] 74

[6. Competition of Individuals and the Formation of Classes. Contradic-
tion between Individuals and Their Conditions of Life. The Illusory
Community of Individuals in Bourgeois Society and the Real Union of
Individuals under Communism. Subordination of the Social Condi-
tions of Life to the Power of the United Individuals] 75

[7. Contradiction between Individuals and Their Conditions of Life as
Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of
Intercourse. Development of the Productive Forces and the Changing

Forms of Intercourse] 81

[8. The Role of Violence (Conquest) in History] 84

[9. Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of
Intercourse under the Conditions of Large-Scale Industry and Free

Competition. Contradiction between Labour and Capital] 85

[10. The Necessity, Preconditions and Consequences of the Abolition of

Private Property] 87

[11.] The Relation of State and Law to Property 89

[12. Forms of Social Consciousness] 92

Contents VII

The Leipzig Council ; 94

II. Saint Bruno 97

1. “Campaign” against Feuerbach 97

2. Saint Bruno’s Views on the Struggle between Feuerbach and Stirner 105

3. Saint Bruno versus the Authors of Die Heilige Familie 107

4. Obituary for “M. Hess” 114

III. Saint Max 117

1. The Unique and His Property 119

The Old Testament: Man 121

1. The Book of Genesis, i.e., A Man’s Life 121

2. The Economy of the Old Testament 130

3. The Ancients 136

4. The Moderns 144

A. The Spirit (Pure History of Spirits) 148

B. The Possessed (Impure History of Spirits) 152

a) The Apparition 157

b) Whimsy 160

C. The Impurely Impure History of Spirits 103

a) Negroes and Mongols 163

b) Catholicism and Protestantism 170

D. Hierarchy 172

5. “Stirner” Delighted in His Construction 185

6. The Free Ones 193

A. Political Liberalism 193

B. Communism 205

C. Humane Liberalism 232

The New Testament: “Ego” 240

1. The Economy of the New Testament 240

2. The Phenomenology of the Egoist in Agreement with

Himself, or the Theory of Justification 242

3. The Revelation of John the Divine, or “The Logic of the New

Wisdom” 272

4. Peculiarity 301

5. The Owner 315

A. My Power 315

I. Right 315

A. Canonisation in General 315

B. Appropriation by Simple Antithesis 319

C. Appropriation by Compound Antithesis 321

II. Law 327

III. Crime 336

VIII

Contents

A. Simple Canonisation of Crime and Punishment 337

a. Crime ; 337

b. Punishment . 339

B. Appropriation of Crime and Punishment Through Antithesis 340

C. Crime in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Sense 343

[B. My Intercourse] 346

[I. Society] 346

5. Society as Bourgeois Society 348

II. Rebellion 377

III. Union 389

1. Landed Property 389

2. Organisation of Labour 391

3. Money 395

4. State 399

5. Rebellion 402

6. Religion and Philosophy of the Union 403

A. Property 403

B. Wealth 407

C. Morality, Intercourse, Theory of Exploitation 408

D. Religion 414

E. Supplement to the Union 415

C. My Self-Enjoyment 417

6. Solomon’s Song of Songs or the Unique 427

2. Apologetical Commentary -444

Close of the Leipzig Council 451

Volume II. Critique of German Socialism According to Its Various
Prophets 453

True Socialism 455

I. Die Rheinischen Jahrbucher or the Philosophy of True Socialism 458

A. “Communismus, Socialismus, Humanismus” 458

B. “Socialisdsche Bausteine” 470

First Cornerstone 474

Second Cornerstone 477

Third Cornerstone 480

IV. Karl Griin: Die Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien (Darmstadt,

1845) or the Historiography of True Socialism 484

Saint-Simonism 493

1 . Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve d ses Contemporains 498

2. Catechisme politique des Industriels 500

Contents

S. Nouveau christianisme 503

4. The School of Saint-Simon 504

Fourierism . 510

•The “Limitations of Papa Cabet” and Herr Grun 519

Proudhon 529

V. “Doctor Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein” or the Prophecies of True

Socialism 531

Frederick Engels. The T rue Socialists 540

NOTES AND INDEXES

Notes 585

Name Index 609

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature . 627

Index of Periodicals 64 1

Subject Index .... 645

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facsimile of Thesis 1 1 on Feuerbach. From Marx’s notebook 9

First page of the Preface to The German Ideology in Marx’s handwriting 25

A page of the manuscript of The German Ideology. From the chapter

“Feuerbach” ( Discovered in the early 1 960s) 34-35

A page of the manuscript of The German Ideology. From the chapter

“Feuerbach” 34“ 35

A page of the manuscript of The German Ideology. From the chapter

“Saint Max” ...226-227

Max Stimer. Drawing by Engels 267

First page of Chapter IV (Volume II) of The German Ideology as published
in the Westpholische Dampfboot No. 8, 1847 487

translators:

CLEMENS DUTT: The German Ideology (Volume I,
“The Leipzig Council”) and “The True So-
cialists”

W. LOUGH: The German Ideology (Volume I, Chapter I,
“Feuerbach”)

C. P. MAGILL: The German Ideology (Volume II)

Preface

The fifth volume of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels contains a major joint work of the founders of
Marxism, The German Ideology, together with the writings immediate-
ly connected with it.

They were all written between the spring of 1845 and the spring of
1847, during Marx’s stay in Brussels, where he moved in February
1845 following his deportation from France by the Guizot govern-
ment. Engels came to Brussels from Barmen in April 1845 and
remained till August 1846. This was the period when Marxism
was finally evolved as the scientific world outlook of the revolu-
tionary proletariat. Marx and Engels had arrived at the decisive
stage in working out the philosophical principles of scientific com-
munism.

It was in The German Ideology that the materialist conception of
history, historical materialism, was first formulated as an integral
theory. Engels said later that this theory, which uncovered the gen-
uine laws of social development and revolutionised the science of
society, embodied the first of Marx’s great discoveries (the second
being the theory of surplus value) which played the main role in
transforming socialism from a utopia into a science. The German
Ideology is in effect the first mature work of Marxism. It immediately
preceded the first published mature Marxist writings — The Poverty of
Philosophy and the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

During the period when The German Ideology and the works closely
connected with it were being written, Marx and Engels devoted their
main efforts to joint theoretical and practical work aimed at setting
out the revolutionary communist teaching and rallying around it the
progressive elements of the proletariat and the revolutionary
intelligentsia. Summing up the tasks they set themselves at that time,

XIV

Preface

Engels wrote later, in his work “On the History of the Communist
League”: “We were both already deeply involved in the political
movement, and possessed a certain following in the educated world,
especially of Western Germany, and abundant contact with the
organised proletariat. It was our duty to provide a scientific
foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win
over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to
our conviction.”

Early in 1846, Marx and Engels founded the Brussels Communist
Correspondence Committee, which took steps to establish interna-
tional contacts between the participants in the working-class
movement, to spread the new communist ideas and to prepare the
ground for the creation of a revolutionary proletarian party. In
August 1846, Engels, on the Committee’s instructions, moved to
Paris to develop revolutionary propaganda among the German and
French workers.

The new revolutionary outlook of Marx and Engels was ham-
mered out in struggle with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology.
They directed their criticism in the first place against the idealist
conception of history inherent in German post-Hegelian philosophy,
including that of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose materialist views were
inconsistent and essentially metaphysical.

The volume opens with Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, of which
Engels wrote in 1888 that they are “invaluable as the first document
in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook”
(Foreword to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy).

The “Theses on Feuerbach” were written in connection with the
project of The German Ideology and represent the initial draft of a
number of general ideas for the first chapter of this work. Nearly all
the basic propositions of the “Theses” were further developed in
The German Ideology. Essentially, they counterpose against contem-
plative and passive pre-Marxian materialism the dialectical materialist
conception of the decisive role of material practice in human
cognition. Practice, Marx stressed, is the starting point, the basis, the
criterion and the purpose of all cognition, including philosophical
theory. And in order to become an effective and active factor of
social development, theory must be embodied in living revolutionary
practical activity.

In the “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx put forward the materialist
conception of “the essence of man”. In opposition to Feuerbach,
who had only an abstract conception of “man” in isolation from
social relations and historical reality, Marx emphasised that real

Preface

men could only be understood as products of social relations. Marx
then went much further than Feuerbach in the critical comprehen-
sion of religion and the ways of overcoming it. He pointed out that it
was not enough to understand the earthly basis of religion. The
condition for eliminating religion, the “Theses” underline, is the
revolutionary elimination of the social contradictions which give rise
to it.

Particularly important is the eleventh thesis, which says: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it” (see this volume, p. 5). Marx himself separated
this thesis from the preceding ten, as though underlining its
summarising character. We must understand the world in order to
change it, instead of interpreting it one way or another in order to
reconcile ourselves with what exists. Such in substance is the true
meaning of this thesis. Organically connected with it is another
thought. The world cannot be changed by merely changing our
notions of it, by theoretically criticising what exists; it must be
understood, and then, proceeding from this, transformed by
effective action, material revolutionary practice. This thesis
concisely formulates the fundamental difference of Marxist
philosophy from all earlier philosophy, including pre-Marxian
materialism. It concentrates into a single sentence the effective,
transforming character of the revolutionary theory created by
Marx and Engels, its inseparable connection with revolutionary
practice.

The basic principles of the new scientific world outlook, which
Marx had formulated in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, were
developed in The German Ideology. This work comprises two volumes.
Volume I is devoted to criticism of the views of Ludwig Feuerbach,
Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, and Volume II to criticism of “true
socialism”. Despite all the efforts of Marx and Engels to have The
German Ideology published, it did not appear in print during their
lifetime, except for one chapter of Volume II. This circumstance
does not, however, diminish its significance. In working on The
German Ideology , Marx and Engels first and foremost clarified to
themselves the basic aspects of the new world outlook. “We
abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all
the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-
clarification,” Marx wrote in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy. The conclusions Marx and Engels
reached constituted the theoretical basis for all their further
scientific and political activity. They were able to impart them to
their closest associates — future prominent proletarian revolu-

XVI

Preface

tionaries. And they soon found an opportunity of making their
conclusions public after giving them a more finished and perfect
form. This was done in The Poverty of Philosophy, by Marx, and the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Marx and Engels.

The German Ideology is remarkable for the great wealth and variety
of its content, since the ideas developed in it relate to many aspects of
the revolutionary teaching which was taking shape. Thus profound
thoughts were expressed on questions pertaining to the theory and
history of the state and of law, to linguistics, aesthetics and literary
criticism. Not only were post-Hegelian philosophy and “true
socialism” subjected to a detailed critical analysis, but digressions
were also made into the history of philosophy and of socialist
theories. And the new materialist interpretation of the history of
social thought was in particular reflected in the positive treatment of
the great social thinkers of the past.

The German Ideology is the continuation of previous works by Marx
and Engels, mainly of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 and The Holy Family, and in a sense synthesises the ideas
contained in them. At the same time, an immense step forward was
made to a qualitatively new stage in the development of the
philosophical foundations of the revolutionary proletarian outlook.
It was in this work that for the first time the materialist way of under-
standing history became an integral conception of the structure of
society and of historical periodisation. By virtue of the general
dialectical law of the transformation of theory into method and of
the unity of world oudook and method, organically inherent in the
new revolutionary teaching, this conception appears in The German
Ideology not only as the theory of society, but also as the method of
understanding social and historical phenomena. Marx and Engels
gave science a powerful weapon for the knowledge of social life, a
means of elucidating both the general course of social development
and the existing social relations. Thus they made possible the
comprehension of social processes which is necessary for active and
revolutionary interference in them. Marx himself saw in this work
the methodological prerequisite for a new political economy. In a
letter to the German publisher Leske on August 1, 1846, he pointed
out that the publication of a polemical work against the German
philosophers was necessary in order to prepare readers for his point
of view in the field of economic science.

The German Ideology is a polemical work. Criticism of views
hostile to the proletarian world oudook occupies a predominant
place in it, often couched in a biting satirical form which gives it
particular force and expressiveness. In the course of their attacks,

Preface

XVII

Marx and Engels continually counterposed their own point of view
to the views they were criticising.

Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology occupies a special
place in the work as a whole. Unlike the other chapters, which are
mainly polemical, it was conceived as a general introduction
expounding the materialist conception of history. The basic
theoretical content of the whole work is indeed concentrated in this
chapter.

First of all Marx and Engels formulate the “premises” of the
materialist conception of history. These premises are the real living
people, their activity and the material conditions under which they
live, both the conditions which they find already existing and those
produced by their activity. Thus, what is underlined here is the
historical character of the material conditions themselves, which are
increasingly influenced by people’s activity. And there are two sides
to it. First, production (people’s active relation to nature, their
influence on it), and, secondly, intercourse (people’s relations to one
another in their activity). Production and intercourse determine each
other, but the decisive side of this mutual action is production.
Subsequently, Marx and Engels introduced the term “relations of
production” to distinguish the social relations people enter into in
production, which are the basic relations underlying everything
included under the term “intercourse”.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels not only developed in all
its aspects the thesis of the decisive role of material production in the
life of society, which they had already formulated in their previous
works, they also revealed for the first time the dialectics of the
development of the productive forces and the relations of produc-
tion. This most important discovery was formulated here as the
dialectics of the productive forces and the form of intercourse. It
illuminated the whole conceptual system of historical materialism
and made it possible to expound the substance of the materialist way
of understanding history as an integral scientific conception.

This discovery' can be reduced to the following propositions. The
productive forces determine the form of intercourse (social rela-
tions). At a certain stage of their development, the productive forces
come into contradiction with the existing form of intercourse. This
contradiction is resolved by social revolutions. In the place of the
previous form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is
evolved which corresponds to the more developed productive forces.
Subsequently, this new form of intercourse in its turn ceases to
correspond to £he developing productive forces, turns into their
fetter and is replaced by an ensuing, historically more progressive

2—2086

XVIII

Preface

form of intercourse. Thus, in the course of the entire historical
development a link of continuity is established between successive
stages. In disclosing the laws of social development, Marx and Engels
arrived at a conclusion of immense significance: “... All collisions in
history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction
between the productive forces and the form of intercourse” (see this
volume, p. 74).

The discovery of the laws of social development provided the key to
the scientific understanding of the entire historical process. It served
as the point of departure for the scientific periodisation of history.
Thus, as Lenin commented: “His [Marx’s] historical materialism was
a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrari-
ness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were
replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory,
which shows how, in consequence of the growth of the productive
forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system
develops — how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism”
( Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 25).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels investigated the basic
determinants of the sequence of phases in the historical development
of social production. They showed that the outward expression of
the level of development of the productive forces is always to be
found in that of the division of labour. Each stage in the division of
labour determines a corresponding form of property and, as Marx
subsequently pointed out, the property relations are but “the legal
expression” of the relations of production. The transition from
primary historical relations to the ensuing stage in social develop-
ment was determined by the development of the productive forces,
resulting in the transition from an initial, natural division of labour
to the social division of labour in the form which is expressed in the
division of society into classes. This was the transition from pre-class
to class society.

Along with the social division of labour there develop such
derivative historical phenomena as private property, the state and
the “estrangement” of social activity. Just as the natural division of
labour in primitive society determines the first, tribal (family) form
of property so the increasing social division of labour determines the
further development and change of the forms of property. The
second form of property is the “ancient communal and state
property”, the third form is “feudal or estate property” and the
fourth is “bourgeois property”. The singling out and analysis of
forms of property which successively replace one another and
dominate at different stages of historical development provided the

basis for the scientific Marxist theory of the social formations, the
successive replacement of which is the principal feature of the whole
historical process.

Marx and Engels examined the last, the bourgeois, form of private
property in greater detail than the other historical forms of
property, tracing its transition from the guild-system to manufacture
and large-scale industry. This was the first time that these two
principal stages in the development of bourgeois society, the
manufacture period and the period of large-scale industry, had been
singled out and analysed. Marx had already demonstrated in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that the emer-
gence of private property was historically conditioned, that it
must necessarily come into being at a certain stage in the
development of human society, and also that it must inevitably be
subsequently abolished. It was proved in The German Ideology that it
is only with the development of large-scale industry that the material
conditions are created for the abolition of private property in the
means of production. And it becomes evident that this abolition is
necessary.

Proceeding from production to the sphere of intercourse, i.e., of
social relations, the social system, Marx and Engels gave a materialist
interpretation of the class structure of society and demonstrated the
role of classes and the class struggle in social life. In The German
Ideology, as compared with the Economic and Philosophic Manu-
scripts of 1844 and The Holy Family, the Marxist theory of classes
and class struggle acquired mature features — those very features
which, as Marx noted in his letter to Weydemeyer of March 5, 1852,
distinguished this theory from the progressive bourgeois historians’
understanding of class struggle. It was demonstrated that the
division of society into antagonistic classes and the existence of
classes are connected with definite stages in the development of
production, that the development of the class struggle must
necessarily lead to a communist revolution carried out by the pro-
letariat, and that this revolution will result in the abolition of classes
and the creation of a classless society.

In The German Ideology considerable attention is devoted to the
political superstructure, and in particular to the relation of the state
and law to property. For the first time the essence of the state in
general and the bourgeois state in particular was revealed. “... The
state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their
common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is
epitomised” (see this volume, p. 90). In analysing the class nature and
the main functions of the state at the capitalist stage of development,

Preface

Marx and Engels pointed out that the bourgeois state “is nothing
more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are
compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the
mutual guarantee of their property and interests” (see this volume,
p. 90).

In dealing with the various forms of social consciousness, the
ideological superstructure, Marx and Engels made clear the general
correlation between the material sphere and the sphere of conscious-
ness. Of particular importance is the classical formulation of the
materialist solution to this basic question of philosophy: “Conscious-
ness [das Bewusstsein ] can never be anything else than conscious being
[das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process....
It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines
consciousness” (see this volume, pp. 36-37). The formation of
consciousness is immensely influenced by the class structure of
society. In their work Marx and Engels disclosed the class origins
of the various forms of consciousness and showed that in a class
society the dominating consciousness is the consciousness of the
ruling class.

Summing up the substance of the materialist conception of history,
Marx and Engels wrote: “This conception of history thus relies on
expounding the real process of production — starting from the
material production of life itself — and comprehending the form of
intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production,
i.e., civil society in its various stages, as the basis of all history;
describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the
different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion,
philosophy, morality, etc., etc., arise from it, and tracing the process
of their formation from that basis; thus the whole thing can, of
course, be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal
action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the
idealist view of history, to look for a category in every period, but
remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain
practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from
material practice, and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that ...
not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of
religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory” (see this
volume, pp. 53-54).

In their subsequent scientific work, Marx and Engels constantly
developed and deepened their materialist conception of history and
perfected the method of historical materialism by applying it in the
various fields of the social sciences. The whole system of con-
cepts— which in The German Ideology still bears the stamp of the

Preface

XXI

formation process of the conception itself — was thus elaborated and
made more precise, and the basic explanatory ideas of historical ma-
terialism were expressed in a more adequate terminology. In later
works of Marx and Engels the various aspects of the concept “mode
of production”, a basic term in historical materialism, were
expounded; the internal law of development of the modes of
production began to be formulated in terms of the dialectical
interaction of productive forces and relations of production, and the
latter were shown to play the main, decisive role — as was made clear
already in The German Ideology — in the system of social relations. The
term “social formation” first appeared in Marx’s economic manu-
script of 1857-58, Critique of Political Economy (the so-called Grund-
risse), and the concept “social-economic formation” was first thor-
oughly expounded in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy ( 1 859), thus providing for the better understand-
ing of the successive replacement of social formations, the general
outline of which was given in The German Ideology. It should be
noted, too, that in the light of the subsequent development of the
theory of scientific communism it becomes evident that, in speaking
in The German Ideology of the “abolition of the division of labour”,
and even of the “abolition of labour”, in communist society, Marx
and Engels had in mind only the division of labour in the conditions
of class-divided society — with its antithesis between mental and
physical labour and people being tied down to certain occupations
and professions — and, in particular, the capitalist form of the
exploitation of labour, not work and its organisation in general.

The classical formulation of the basic propositions of the
materialist conception of history was later set down by Marx in the
already-mentioned preface to his book A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy.

This scientific materialist theory of social development served
Marx and Engels as the theoretical foundation for their conclusions
about the communist transformation of society. The principal
conclusion from the materialist conception of history, already
substantiated in The German Ideology, is the historical necessity of a
proletarian, communist revolution. Marx and Engels stressed that
“for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question
of revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to
grips with and changing the things found in existence” (see this
volume, pp. 38-39).

The development of the productive forces within bourgeois society,
Marx and Engels pointed out, provides the two basic material
premises of a communist revolution. These are: first, a high

XXII

Preface

level of production, which is incompatible with private property and
at the same time is necessary for the organisation of society on a
communist basis; and, secondly, mass proletarianisation, the forma-
tion of the proletariat, the most revolutionary class in modern
society. This definition of the premises of a communist revolution
is one of the fundamental conclusions of scientific communism
contained in The German Ideology.

It was in The German Ideology that Marx and Engels first spoke of
the necessity for the proletariat to conquer political power as the only
way of carrying out a communist revolution. They pointed out:
“... Every class which is aiming at domination, even when its
domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition of
the old form of society in its entirety and of all domination, must first
conquer political power” (see this volume, p. 47). Thus we find
expressed for the first time the idea of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, though as yet only in a most general form.

Marx and Engels stressed that a communist revolution is a dual
process: a change in people’s conditions of life, and at the same time
a change in the people themselves who carry out the revolution. This
thought, already contained in the ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach”, was given
its classical formulation in The German Ideology : “... The revolution is
necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing
it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck
of ages and become fitted to found society anew” (see this vol-
ume, p. 53).

The German Ideology expounds the basic features of future
communist society — the abolition of private property, of the class
division of labour and of classes themselves, the transformation of
production and all the social relations, and the disappearance of the
state, the instrument of class domination. People’s own activity will
cease to confront them as a power alien to them. The antagonism
between town and country and between mental and physical labour
will be eliminated. Labour will be transformed from activity people
perform under compulsion into the genuine self-activity of free
people. The real liberation and all-round development of every
individual will be the highest aim of the communist organisation of
society.

This view of the future communist society is presented in The
German Ideology for the first time as an integral theory, free from all
the artificial, dogmatic construing of the future system which was
typical of the utopian Socialists despite all the brilliant conjectures
they made. The foresight of Marx and Engels was based on an

Preface

XXIII

analysis of the real tendencies of social development and was the
result of comprehension of its real laws. By expounding the specific
features of future communism, Marx and Engels were laying the
foundations of the scientific forecasting of social processes.

Not only the positive aspect of The German Ideology, the exposition
of the authors’ views, but also the critical content of this work was of
great significance in shaping the new revolutionary world outlook.
This criticism was mainly directed against the idealist conceptions of
German post-Hegelian philosophy. And by subjecting the views of
the German philosophers to a critical analysis, Marx and Engels in
fact presented a radical and scientifically based criticism of previous
philosophical thought as a whole. They demonstrated the untenabili-
ty of the idealist interpretations of history inherent in all previous
philosophy, sociology and historiography. The thinkers working in
these fields could never understand the real social processes and
their true character. At best they could grasp and more or less
correctly describe only individual aspects of these processes without
seeing the general connections determining them. The idealist
interpretation of history, The German Ideology underlined, leads to
only a superficial and illusory perception of the historical process,
and explains it in an illusory way. The socialist theories based on a
similar interpretation were likewise incapable of going beyond the
bounds of fantastic notions and utopias.

A large part of The German Ideology is occupied by criticism of the
Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. The need for
such criticism arose, as Engels pointed out, from the fact that
Bauer and Stirner were “the representatives of the ultimate
consequences of abstract German philosophy, and therefore the only
important philosophical opponents of Socialism — or rather Com-
munism ...” (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 241).

The German Ideology completes the criticism, begun in The Holy
Family, of the subjective-idealist views of Bruno Bauer, with their
mystification of the historical process and contraposition of the
outstanding individuals, who were supposed to be the sole makers of
history, to the “passive and inert” masses. By citations from the latest
writings of Bruno Bauer and other Young Hegelians, Marx and
Engels drove home their characterisation, given in The Holy Family,
of Young Hegelian ideas as unscientific and anti-revolutionary. In
this respect there is partial textual coincidence between the
corresponding chapter in The German Ideology and the article “A
Reply to Bruno Bauer’s Anti-Critique” written by Marx and Engels
in refutation of the Young Hegelian leader’s attempt to dispute their
criticism of his views in The Holy Family.

XXIV

Preface

Most of the first volume of The German Ideology is taken up by a
critical examination of the philosophical and sociological views of
Max Stirner, formulated in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
( The Unique and His Property). Stirner was a typical exponent of
individualism and one of the first ideologists of anarchism. His views,
reflecting a petty-bourgeois protest against the bourgeois system,
enjoyed a considerable success among petty-bourgeois intellectuals
and to some extent influenced the immature outlook of craftsmen
who were becoming proletarians, while his failure to understand the
role of the proletariat, whom he identified with paupers, and also his
attacks on communism, made a resolute exposure of his views
indispensable.

Marx and Engels demonstrated the artificial and far-fetched
character of Stirner’s philosophical and sociological constructions
and the fallacy of his theory that the way to the liberation of the
individual lay through the destruction of the state and the implemen-
tation of every individual’s egoistic right to self-assertion. They
pointed out that Stirner’s voluntaristic appeals to the rights of the
individual did not in any way affect the existing social relations and
their economic basis, and so, in effect, continued to sanction the
preservation of the bourgeois social conditions which are the main
source of inequality and oppression of the individual. Stirner’s
seemingly revolutionary phrases were in fact a disguise for an
apologia of the bourgeois system.

The exposure of Stirner’s anarchist views in The German Ideology
was essentially a criticism of all such individualistic theories which
substitute fruitless rebellion by isolated individuals for participation
in the real revolutionary movement and preach total negation and
destruction instead of the positive communist aims of struggle. Marx
and Engels pointed out that the path outlined by Stirner and his like
could by no means lead to the liberation of the individual. Only a
communist revolution, carried out by the working class in the
interests of all the working people, can break the fetters with which
the individual is shackled by the existing capitalist system, and can
lead to the genuine freedom and free development of the individual,
to harmonious unity of public and personal interests.

The second volume of The German Ideology and Engels’ manuscript
“The True Socialists”, which is its direct continuation, further
show that, in substance, German “true socialism” was only a philistine
variety of earlier petty-bourgeois social utopianism and that, under
the pretence of “universal love for man”, the “true socialists” were
spreading ideas of class peace, renouncing the struggle for
democratic freedoms and revolutionary change. This was particular-

Preface

XXV

ly dangerous at the time in Germany, where the struggle of all the
democratic forces against absolutism and feudal relations was
growing sharper while at the same time the contradictions between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were becoming more and more
acute. Marx and Engels likewise subjected to devastating criticism
the German nationalism of the “true socialists” and their arrogant
attitude to other nations. They criticised in detail the philosophical
views of the “true socialists”, their aesthetic views, and the tendency
of some of them to give socialism a religious tinge and to impart to
it the character of a religious prophecy.

Both by its positive ideas and by its criticism of ideological trends
hostile to the proletarian world outlook, including those couched in
pseudo-revolutionary and socialist phrases, The German Ideology
represented an important landmark in the development of Marxism.
This work signified a decisive stage in the philosophical and
sociological grounding of the theory of scientific communism, in the
scientific demonstration of the world-historic role of the working
class as the social force whose historical mission is to overthrow the
exploiting capitalist system and create the new communist society.

* * *

The works contained in this volume have been translated from the
original German text. The German Ideology, which forms the greater
part of this volume, was never published in the authors’ lifetimes,
except for one chapter, nor arranged by them for publication, and
has come down to us incomplete. The text of The German Ideology has
been re-checked and re-arranged in accordance with the researches
of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with a view to presenting
it in a form corresponding as closely as possible to the layout and
content of the manuscript. In particular, Chapter I, “Feuerbach”,
which was not finished by the authors and has reached us only in the
form of several separate manuscripts, is presented in accordance
with the new arrangement and subdivision of the text prepared by
Georgi Bagaturia and edited by Vladimir Brushlinsky (first pub-
lished in English in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works ,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, Vol. 1, and also separately under
the title Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Feuerbach: Opposition of the
Materialist and Idealist Outlooks, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1973).

The whole work on this volume has been finalised by Lev
Churbanov. He also prepared the Preface, the Notes and the Subject

XXVI

Preface

Index, which have been edited by Lev Golman (both of the Institute
of Marxism-Leninism).

The Name Index, the Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature
and the Index of Periodicals were prepared by Nina Loiko, of the
Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

The English translation of the bulk of The German Ideology, i.e.,
“The Leipzig Council”, and also Engels’ essay “The True Socialists”,
was made by Clemens Dutt. The translation of Chapter I,
“Feuerbach”, Volume I, was made by W. Lough, and that of
Volume II by C. P. Magill, these two sections having been edited by
Roy Pascal for the English edition published by Lawrence 8c Wishart,
London, in 1938.

The English translations were edited for this volume by Maurice
Cornforth, E. J. Hobsbawm and Margaret Mynatt for Lawrence &
Wishart, and Salo Ryazanskaya, for Progress Publishers, and finally
passed for the press by the editors Lydia Belyakova, Nadezhda
Rudenko and Victor Schnittke, Progress Publishers.

The scientific editing was done by Georgi Bagaturia and Norair
Ter- Akopyan (Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

KARL MARX
and

FREDERICK ENGELS

WORKS

April 1845-April 1847

Karl Marx

[THESES ON FEUERBACH3]

1) ad FEUERBACH1

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach
included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness
are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but
not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in
contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth
abstractly by idealism — which, of course, does not know real,
sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really
distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive human
activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christenthums, he
therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely
human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its
dirty-Jewish form of appearance.2 Hence he does not grasp the
significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man
must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness
of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality
of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic
question.

Original version. — Ed.

Karl Marx

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of cir-
cumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed
by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This
doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which
is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human
activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood
only as revolutionary practice.

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement,
of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular
one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular
basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes
itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by
the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis.
The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradi-
ction and revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the
earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the
former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants [sensuous]
contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical,
human-sensuous activity.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man.
But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single
individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real
essence, is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the
religious sentiment [Gemiit] by itself, and to presuppose an
abstract — isolated — human individual.

2. Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as “species”, as an
inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in
a natural way.

Theses on Feuerbach

Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious senti-
ment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which
he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory
to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the
comprehension of this practice.

The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is,
materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical
activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the
standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
the point is to change it.

Written in the spring of 1845

This version was first published in
1 924 — in German and in Russian — by
the Institute of Marxism-Leninism
of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U
in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow

Printed according to the manu-
script

Karl Marx

[THESES ON FEUERBACH3]

MARX ON FEUERBACH
( Written in Brussels in the spring of 1845)

The chief defect of all previous materialism — that of Feuerbach
included — is that things [ Gegenstand ], reality, sensuousness are
conceived only in the form of the object , or of contemplation, but not as
human seTisuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened
that the active side t in contradistinction to materialism, was set forth by
idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know
real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects,
really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive
human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christen-
thums, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only ge-
nuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only
in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the
significance of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical, activity.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man
must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness
of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality
of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic
question.

Edited by Engels. — Ed.

Theses on Feuerbach

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances
and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of
other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men
who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be
educated. Hence, this doctrine is bound to divide society into two
parts, one of which is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for
example).

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human
activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as
revolutionising practice.

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement,
of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and
a real one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its
secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work,
the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular
basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an
independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and
intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself,
therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the
removal of the contradiction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for
instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the
holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and
transformed in practice.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking , appeals to sensuous
contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical,
human-sensuous activity.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real
essence, is hence obliged:

Karl Marx

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the
religious sentiment [ Gemiit ] regarded by itself, and to presuppose an
abstract — isolated — human individual.

2. The essence of man, therefore, can with him be regarded only
as “species”, as an inner, mute, general character which unites the
many individuals only in a natural way.

Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious senti-
ment” is itself a social product , and that the abstract individual which
he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society.

Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory
into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in
the comprehension of this practice.

The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is,
materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical
activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in “civil society”.

The standpoint of the old materialism is “civil” society; the
standpoint of the new is human society, or associated humanity.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
the point, however, is to change it.

Written in the spring of 1845

Printed according to the book

First published by Engels
in the Appendix to the separate
edition of his Ludwig Feuerbach
und der Ausgang der klassischen
deutschen Philosophic, Stuttgart, 1888

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Die Philosopher! haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretirt,
es kommt drauf an sie zu verandem.

Facsimile of Thesis 1 1 on Feuerbach. From Marx’s notebook

Frederick Engels

FEUERBACH3

a) The entire philosophy of Feuerbach amounts to 1. philosophy
of nature — passive adoration of nature and enraptured kneeling
down before its splendour and omnipotence. 2. Anthropology,
namely «) physiology, where nothing new is added to what the
materialists have already said about the unity of body and soul, but
it is said less mechanically and with rather more exuberance,
J5) psychology, which amounts to dithyrambs glorifying love, analo-
gous to the cult of nature, apart from that nothing new. 3. Morality,
the demand to live up to the concept of “man”,3 impuissance mise en
action .b Compare §54, p. 81: “The ethical and rational attitude of
man to his stomach consists in treating it not as something bestial but
as something human.” — §61: “Man ... as a moral being” and all the
talk about morality in Das Wesen des Christenthums.

b) The fact that at the present stage of development men can
satisfy their needs only within society, that in general from the very
start, as soon as they came into existence, men needed one another
and could only develop their needs and abilities, etc., by entering
into intercourse c with other men, this fact is expressed by Feuerbach
in the following way:

3 Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophic der Zukunft, § 52. — Ed.
b Powerlessness set in motion. Charles Fourier, Theorie des quatre mouvements, et des
destinees generates, deuxieme partie. Epilogue. — Ed.
c See Note 11. — Ed.

Frederick Engels

“Isolated man by himself has not the essenceof man in himself ’; “the essence of man is
contained only in the community, in the unity of man and man, a unity, however, which
depends only on the reality of the difference between I and you. — Man by himself is
man (in the ordinary sense), man and man, the unity of I and you, is God" (i.e., man in
the supraordinary sense) (§§ 61, 62, p. 83).

Philosophy has reached a point when the trivial fact of the
necessity of intercourse between human beings — a fact without a
knowledge of which the second generation that ever existed would
never have been produced, a fact already involved in the sexual
difference — is presented by philosophy at the end of its entire
development as the greatest result. And presented, moreover, in the
mysterious form of “the unity of I and you”. This phrase would have
been quite impossible had Feuerbach not xax’ e$opjva thought of
the sexual act, the conjugal act, the community of I and you.* And
insofar as his community becomes real it is moreover limited to the
sexual act and to arriving at an understanding about philosophical
ideas and problems, to “true dialectics” (§ 64), to dialogue, to “the
procreation of man, both spiritual and physical man” (p. 67). What
this “ procreated ’ man does afterwards, apart from again “spiritually”
and “physically” “procreating men”, is not mentioned. Feuerbach
only knows intercourse between two beings,

“the truth that no being on its own is a true, perfect, absolute being, that truth and
perfection is only the association, the unity of two beings that are essentially alike’’
(pp. 83, 84).

c) The beginning of the Philosophie der Zukunft immediately shows
the difference between us and him:

§ 1: “The task of modern times was the realisation and humanisation of God, the
transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.” Cf. “The negation of
theology is the essence of modern times” (Philosophie der Zukunft, p. 23).

* For, since the human being = brain + heart, and two are necessary to represent
the human being, one of them personifies the brain in their intercourse, the other the
heart — man and woman. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand whv two
persons are more human than one.b Saint-Simonist individual.4

a Mainly. — Ed.

b Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 58. — Ed.

Feuerbach

d) The distinction that Feuerbach makes between Catholicism and
Protestantism in §2 — Catholicism: “theology” “is concerned with
what God is in himself”, it has a “tendency towards speculation and
contemplation”; Protestantism is merely Christology, it leaves God to
himself and speculation and contemplation to philosophy — this
distinction is nothing but a division of labour arisen from a need
appropriate to immature science. Feuerbach explains Protestantism
merely from this need within theology, whereupon an independent
history of philosophy naturally follows.

e) “Being is not a general concept which can be separated from things. It is
identical with the things that exist.... Being is posited by essence. What my
essence is, is my being. The fish is in the water, but its essence cannot be separated from
this being. Even language identifies being and essence. It is only in human life that
being is divorced from essence — but only in exceptional, unfortunate cases — only there
is it possible that a person’s essence is not in the place where he is, but it is precisely
because of this division that his spirit is not truly in the place where his body actually is.
Only where your heart is, there you are. But all things — apart from abnormal cases — like
to be in the place where they are, and like to be what they are” (p. 47).

A fine panegyric upon the existing state of things! Apart from
abnormal cases, a few exceptional cases, you like to work from your
seventh year as a door-keeper in a coal-mine, remaining alone in the
dark for fourteen hours a day, and because it is your being
therefore it is also your essence. The same applies to a piecer3 at a
self-actor.3 It is your “essence” to be subservient to a branch of
labour. Cf. Das Wesen des Glaubens, p. 11, “unsatisfied hunger” [...]b

f) § 48, p. 73. “ Time is the only means that makes it possible without contradiction to
combine opposite or contradictory determinations in a single being. This applies at all
events to living beings. Only thus does here— for example in man — the contradiction
make its appearance that now this determination, this resolution, dominates and
occupies me, and then a quite different and diametrically opposed determination.”

Feuerbach describes this as 1) a contradiction, 2) a combination of
contradictions, and 3) alleges that time brings this about. Indeed time

3 This word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

b Engels did not finish this sentence. A similar idea is expressed in Chapter I of The
German Ideology (cf. p. 58 of this volume). — Ed.

Frederick Engels

“filled” with events, but still time, and not that which takes place
during this time.3 The proposition amounts to the statement: it is only
in time that change is possible.

Written probably in the autumn Printed according to the manu-

of 1 845 script

First published in German in 1932
in Marx/Engels, Gesamtansgabe,

Erste Abteilung, Bd. 5

Ludwig Feuerbach , Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 1 2. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

[A REPLY TO BRUNO BAUER’S ANTI-CRITIQUE5]

Brussels, November 20. In Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, Vol. Ill,
p. 138 ff., Bruno Bauer stammers out a few words in answer to Die
heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik, 1845, by Engels and
Marx .a At the outset Bruno Bauer declares that Engels and Marx have
misunderstood him; with unaffected naivete he repeats his old
pretentious phrases, which have long since been reduced to nothing,
and regrets that these writers do not know his catchwords about “the
constant struggle and victory, the destruction and creation of
criticism”, which is the “only historical force”, his assertions that
“the critic and only the critic has smashed religion in its entirety and
the state in its various manifestations”, that “the critic has worked
and still works”, and similar high-sounding protestations and lofty
effusions. In his reply Bauer immediately provides new and striking
proof of “ how the critic has worked and still works”. For the
“hard-working” critic considers that it serves his purpose better not to
make the book by Engels and Marx the object of his exclamations and
quotations, but a mediocre and confused review of this book published
in the Westphalische Dampfboot (May issue, p. 206 ff.) 6 — a conjuring
trick, which, with critical prudence, he conceals from the reader.

While Bauer is copying from the Dampfboot, he interrupts his
“ arduous work” only with laconic, but highly ambiguous shrugging of
his shoulders. Critical criticism has limited itself to shrugging its
shoulders since it has no more to say. It finds salvation in the
shoulder-blades despite its hatred of the sensuous world, which it can

See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 3-21 1. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

only conceive in the shape of a “stick” (see Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift,
p. 130), an instrument for chastising its theological bareness.

In his superficial haste the Westphalian reviewer gives a ridiculous
summary which is utterly at variance with the book he is reviewing.
The “ hard-working ” critic copies the fabrications of the reviewer,
attributes them to Engels and Marx and triumphantly shouts to the
uncritical mass — which he annihilates with one eye, while with the
other he flirtatiously invites it to come nearer — see, these are my
opponents!

Let us now place side by side the words of these documents.

The reviewer writes in the Westphalische Dampfboot :

“In order to kill the Jews he” ( Bruno Bauer) “transforms them into theologians, and
the problem of political emancipation into that of human emancipation; to annihilate
Hegel he transforms him into Herr Hinrichs; to get rid of the French Revolution,
communism and Feuerbach he shouts ‘mass, mass, mass!’ and again ‘mass, mass,
mass!’ and crucifies it to the glory of the spirit, which is criticism, the true incarnation
of the absolute idea in Bruno of Charlottenburg” (Das Westphalische Dampfboot, 1. c.,

p. 212).

The “ hard-working ” critic writes:

“The critic of critical criticism” becomes “in the end childish”, “plays the
Harlequin on the theatro mundi” and “would have us believe”, “asserting in all
seriousness, that Bruno Bauer in order to kill the Jews”, etc., etc. — there follows verba-
tim the whole passage from the Westphalische Dampfboot, which is nowhere to be found
in Die heilige Familie ( Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, p. 142).

Compare this with the attitude of critical criticism to the Jewish
question and to political emancipation in Die heilige Familie, inter alia,
pp. 163-85; regarding its attitude to the French Revolution cf. pp.
185-95; and its attitude to socialism and communism, pp. 22-74,
p. 21 1 ff., pp. 243-44 and the whole chapter on critical criticism in
the person of Rudolph, Prince of Geroldstein, pp. 258-333.® Regar-
ding the attitude of critical criticism to Hegel see the mystery of “spe-
culative construction” and the following explanation on p. 79 ff., also
pp. 121 and 122, 126-28, 136-37, 208-09, 215-27 and 304-08; on the
attitude of critical criticism to Feuerbach see pp. 138-41, and finally
on the result and the trend of the critical fight against the French Re-
volution, materialism and socialism see pp. 214-15.b

One can see from these quotations that the Westphalian reviewer
has given a completely distorted and only imaginary summary

a See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 106-18, 118-24, 23-72, 134 ff., 151-53, 162-
209. — Ed.

b Ibid., pp. 57 ff., 82 and 83, 85-87, 91-92, 131-32, 136-43, 191-93, 92-94, 135-
36.— Ed.

A Reply to Bruno Bauer’s Anti-Critique

showing that he has absurdly misunderstood the arguments. It is this
summary which with “creative and devastating” agility the “pure”
and “ hard-working ” critic substitutes for the original.

Furthermore.

The reviewer writes in the W estphalische Dampfboot :

“To his” (that is, Bruno Bauer’s) “ silly self-apotheosis, in which he seeks to prove that
wherever he was formerly in thrall to the prejudices of the mass, this enthralment was
merely a necessary guise of criticism, Marx replies by offering to provide the following
little scholastic treatise: ‘Why the conception of the Virgin Mary had to be proved by no
other than Herr Bruno Bauer* ” etc., etc. ( Dampfboot , p. 213).

The “hard-working” critic:

“He” (the critic of critical criticism) “wants to make us believe, and in the end
himself believes his humbug, that wherever Bauer was formerly in thrall to the
prejudices of the mass he wants to present this enthralment merely as a necessary
guise of criticism and not on the contrary as the result of the necessary development of
criticism; in reply to this ‘silly self-apotheosis’ he therefore offers the following
little scholastic treatise: ‘Why the conception of the Virgin Mary’” etc., etc. ( Wigand’s
Vierteljahrsschrift, pp. 142-43).

The reader will find in Die heilige Familie, pp. 1 50-63, a a special
section on Bruno Bauer's self-apology, but unfortunately nothing is
written there about the little scholastic treatise, which is therefore by
no means offered in reply to Bruno Bauer's self-apology, as the
Westphalian reviewer writes; and the obliging Bruno Bauer copies
this — even enclosing some words in inverted commas — assuming it to
be a quotation from Die heilige Familie. The little treatise is
mentioned in a different section and in a different context (see Die
heilige Familie, pp. 164 and 165b). What it signifies there the reader
may find out for himself and again admire the “pure” cunning of
the “hard-working critic”.

In the end the “ hard-working ” critic exclaims:

“This” (namely the quotations which Bruno Bauer has borrowed from the
W estphalische Dampfboot and attributed to the authors of Die heilige Familie) “has of
course reduced Bruno Bauer to silence and brought criticism to its senses. On the
contrary, Marx has presented us with a spectacle by finally himself appearing in the role
of the amusing comedian” ( Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, p. 143).

To understand this “on the contrary” one has to know that the
Westphalian reviewer, for whom Bruno Bauer works as a copyist,
dictates the following to his critical and hard-working scribe:

“The world-historic drama” (that is, the fight of Bauer’s criticism against the mass)
“quite simply disintegrates into the most amusing comedy ” (Das W estphalische Dampfboot,
p. 213).

a See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 99-106. — Ed.

b Ibid., pp. 106-08. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Here the hapless copyist jumps to his feet: to transcribe his own
condemnation is beyond his power. “On the contrary he cries
interrupting the dictation of the Westphalian reviewer, “on the
contrary ... Marx ... is the most amusing comedian! ” and he wipes the
cold sweat from his brow.

By resorting to incompetent jugglery , to the most deplorable
conjuring trick, Bruno Bauer has in the final analysis confirmed the
death sentence passed upon him by Engels and Marx in Die heilige
Familie.

Printed according to the journal

Written on November 20, 1845

Published in Gesellschaftsspiegel,
Heft VII, Januar 1846

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

CRITIQUE OF MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
ACCORDING TO ITS REPRESENTATIVES
FEUERBACH, B. BAUER AND STIRNER,

AND OF GERMAN SOCIALISM
ACCORDING TO ITS VARIOUS PROPHETS7

Written between November 1 845 Printed according to the manu-

and August 1846 script

First published in full in 1932

by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism

of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe,

Erste Abteilung, Bd. 5

CRITIQUE

OF MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
ACCORDING TO ITS REPRESENTATIVES
FEUERBACH, B. BAUER AND STIRNER

Preface

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves,
about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged
their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man,
etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They,
the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate
them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under
the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against this rule
of concepts. Let us teach men, says one,3 how to exchange these
imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man;
says another,15 how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the
third,0 how to get them out of their heads; and existing reality will
collapse.

These innocent and child-like fancies are the kernel of the modern
Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the
German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our
philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its world-shatter-
ing danger and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the
present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take
themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating
merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German
middle class; that the boasting of these philosophic commentators
only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It
is its aim to ridicule and discredit the philosophic struggle with the

a Ludwig Feuerbach. — Ed.
b Bruno Bauer.— Ed.
c Max Stirner. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled
German nation.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were
drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of
gravity.. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by
avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be
sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long
he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful
consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.
This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary
philosophers in Germany.*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] There is no specific
difference between German idealism and the ideology of all the other nations. The
latter too regards the world as dominated by ideas, ideas and concepts as the
determining principles, and certain notions as the mystery of the material world
accessible to the philosophers.

Hegel completed positive idealism. He not only turned the whole material world
into a world of ideas and the whole of history into a history of ideas. He was not
content with recording thought entities, he also sought to describe the act of creation.

Roused from their world of fancy, the German philosophers protest against the world
of ideas to which they [...] the conception of the real, material [...]

All the German philosophical critics assert that the real world of men has hitherto
been dominated and determined by ideas, images, concepts, and that the real world is
a product of the world of ideas. This has been the case up to now, but it ought to be
changed. They differ from each other in the manner in which they intend to deliver
mankind, which in their opinion is groaning under the weight of its own fixed ideas;
they differ in respect of what they proclaim to be fixed ideas; they agree in their belief
in the hegemony of ideas, they agree in the belief that the action of their critical reason
must bring about the destruction of the existing order of things: whether they
consider their isolated rational activity sufficient or want to conquer universal
consciousness.

The belief that the real world is the product of the ideal world, that the world of
ideas [...]

Having lost their faith in the Hegelian world of ideas, the German philosophers
protest against the domination of thoughts, ideas, and concepts which, according to
their opinion, i.e., according to Hegel’s illusion, have hitherto produced, determined
and dominated the real world. They make their protest and expire [...]

According to the Hegelian system ideas, thoughts and concepts have produced,
determined, dominated the real life of men, their material world, their actual
relations. His rebellious disciples take this [...]

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First page of the Preface to The German Ideology
in Marx’s handwriting

FEUERBACH

OPPOSITION OF THE MATERIALIST
* AND IDEALIST OUTLOOKS8

[I]

|sh.l| According to German ideologists, Germany has in the last
few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposi-
tion of the Hegelian system, which began with Strauss,9 has
developed into a universal ferment into which all the “powers of the
past” are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen
only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged momen-
tarily to be again hurled into obscurity by bolder and stronger rivals.
It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was child’s
play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi10
appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, intellectual
heroes overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the
three years 1842-45 more was cleared away in Germany than at other
times in three centuries.

All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure
thought.

Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the
putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had
failed, the various components of this caput mortuum a began to
decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new
substances. The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived
on the exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new
combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his
apportioned share. This was bound to give rise to competition,
which, to start with, was carried on in moderately civil and staid

a Literally: dead head; a term used in chemistry for the residuum left after
distillation; here: remainder, residue. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

fashion. Later, when the German market was glutted, and the
commodity in spite of all efforts was not favourably received in
the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German
manner by cheap and spurious production, deterioration in
quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels,
fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of
any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which
is now being extolled and interpreted to us as an upheaval of
world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results
and achievements.

If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry,
which awakens even in the breast of the righteoifs German citizen a
glow of patriotic feeling, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness,
the parochial narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement
and in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of
these heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements
themselves, we must look at the whole spectacle from a standpoint
beyond the frontiers of Germany.*

[1.] IDEOLOGY IN GENERAL, GERMAN IDEOLOGY
IN PARTICULAR

|sh.2| German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never left
the realm of philosophy. It by no means examines its general
philosophic premises, but in fact all its problems originate in a
definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in its answers,
even in its questions there was a mystification. This dependence on
Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even

* [In the first version of the clean copy there follows a passage, which is crossed
out:] |p. 2 1

We preface therefore the specific criticism of individual representatives of
this movement with a few general observations, elucidating the ideological premises
common to all of them. These remarks will suffice to indicate the standpoint of our
criticism insofar as it is required for the understanding and the motivation of the
subsequent individual criticisms. We oppose these remarks |p. 3| to Feuerbach in
particular because he is the only one who has at least made some progress and whose
works can be examined de bonne foi.

1. Ideology in General, and Especially German Philosophy
A. We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history
from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two
sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are
dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system,
however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel.
Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are
confined to this — each takes one aspect of the Hegelian system and
turns this against the whole system as well as against the aspects
chosen by the others. To begin with they took pure, unfal-
sified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-con-
sciousness”,a later they secularised these categories by giving
them more profane names such as “species”, “the unique”,
“man”,b etc.

The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to
Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions.* The critics
started from real religion and theology proper. What religious
consciousness and religious conception are was subsequently defined
in various ways. The advance consisted in including the allegedly
dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other concep-
tions under the category of religious or theological conceptions; and
similarly in declaring that political, juridical, moral consciousness
was religious or theological consciousness, and that the political,
juridical, moral man — “Man” in the last resort — was religious. The
dominance of religion was presupposed. Gradually every dominant
relationship was declared to be a religious relationship and
transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the state, etc. It was
throughout merely a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The
world was sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at last the
venerable Saint Maxc was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose
of it once for all.

The Old Hegelians had understood everything as soon as it was

science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men,
since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this
history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of
this history.

[There follows a passage dealing with the premises of the materialist conception of
history. It is not crossed out and in this volume it is reproduced as Section 2; see
pp. 31-32.]

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] claiming to be the
absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and
treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these
philosophers.

a The basic categories of David Friedrich Strauss and Bruno Bauer. — Ed.
b The basic categories of Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner. — Ed.
c Max Stirner. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

reduced to a Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians
criticised everything by ascribing religious conceptions to it or by
declaring that it is a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in
agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of
religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world.
Except that the one party attacks this rule as usurpation, while the
other extols it as legitimate.

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas,
in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an
independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old
Hegelians declare them the true bonds of human society), it is
evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these
illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy,
the relations of men, all their doings, their fetters and their
limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians
logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present
consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness,3 and thus
of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness
amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different
way, i.e., to recognise it by means of a different interpretation. The
Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-
shattering”b phrases, are the staunchest conservatives. The most
recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity
when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases”. They
forget, however, that they themselves are opposing nothing but
phrases to these phrases, and that they are in no way combating the
real existing world when they are combating solely the phrases of
this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism was
able to achieve were a few (and at that one-sided) elucidations of
Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest
of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim
to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries
of world-historic importance.

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into
the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the
connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings. c

3 A reference to Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, whose basic
categories were, respectively, “man”, “criticism” and “ego”. — Ed.

b Cf. “Ueber das Recht des Freigesprochenen ...” published anonymously in
Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Bd. IV. — Ed.

c The rest of this page of the manuscript is left blank. The text following on the
next page of the manuscript is reproduced in this volume as Section 3; see pp. 32-
35 .—Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

[2. PREMISES OF THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY3]

|p. 3 1 The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones,
not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be
made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity
and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find
already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises
can thus be |p. 4| verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence
of living human individuals.* Thus the first fact to be established is
the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent
relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either
into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions
in which man finds himself — geological, oro-hydrographical,
climatic and so on.** All historical writing must set out from these
natural bases and their modification in the course of history through
the action of men.

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by
religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to
distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce
their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their
physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men
are indirectly producing their material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence
depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they
actually find in existence and have to reproduce.

|p. 5 1 This mode of production must not be considered simply as
being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals.
Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite
form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As
individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore,
coincides with their production, both with what they produce and

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The first historical act
of these individuals distinguishing them from animals is not that they think, but that
they begin to produce their means of subsistence.

** [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] These conditions
determine not only the original, spontaneous organisation of men, especially racial
differences, but also the entire further development, or lack of development, of men
up to the present time.

3 The text of the following section has been taken from the first version
of the clean copy. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the
material conditions of their production.

This production only makes its appearance with the increase of
population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr]11 of
individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again
determined by production.

[3. PRODUCTION AND INTERCOURSE.

DIVISION OF LABOUR

AND FORMS OF PROPERTY— TRIBAL, ANCIENT, FEUDAL]

[sh.3| The relations of different nations among themselves depend
upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces,
the division of labour and internal intercourse. This proposition is
generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to
others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself
depends on the stage of development reached by its production and
its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces
of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to
which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive
force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of
productive forces already known (for instance, the bringing into
cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the
division of labour.

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation
of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to
the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their
interests. Its further development leads to the separation of
commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the
division of labour inside these various branches there develop
various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite
kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is
determined by the way work is organised in agriculture, industry
and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same
conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the
relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are
just so many different forms of property, i.e., the existing stage in
the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to
one another with reference to the material, instrument and product
of labour.

The first form of property is tribal property [ Stammeigentum ].12

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a
people lives by hunting and fishing, by cattle-raising or, at most, by
agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of
uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this
stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension
of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The
social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the
family: patriarchal chieftains, below them the members of the
tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops
gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants,
and with the extension of external intercourse, both of war and
of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and state property,
which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city
by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by
slavery. Beside communal property we already find movable, and
later also immovable, private property developing, but as an
abnormal form subordinate to communal property. The citizens
hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and
even on this account alone they are bound to the form of communal
property. It constitutes the communal private property of the active
citizens who, in relation to their slaves, are compelled to remain in
this spontaneously derived form of association. For this reason the
whole structure of society based on this communal property, and
with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure in which
immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already-
more developed. We already find the opposition of town and country;
later the opposition between those states which represent town
interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the
towns themselves the opposition between industry and maritime
commerce. The class relations between citizens and slaves are now
completely developed.

With the development of private property, we find here for the first
time the same relations which we shall find again, only on a more
extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the
concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as
the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from
the time of the civil wars and especially under the emperors 13; on the
other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian
small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its
intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never
achieved an independent development.

The third form is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

from the town and its small territory, the Middle Ages started out
from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the
sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a
large area and which received no large increases from the
conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development,
therefore, begins over a much wider territory, prepared by the
Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated
with them. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its
conquest by the barbarians destroyed a considerable part of the
productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed
for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently
interrupted, the rural and urban population had decreased. These
conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined
by them, together with the influence of the Germanic military
constitution, led to the development of feudal property. Like tribal
and communal property, it is also based on a community; but the
directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case
of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small
peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises
antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of landowner-
ship, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the
nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just
as much as the ancient communal property, an association against a
subjected producing class; but the form of association and the
relation to the direct producers were different because of the
different conditions of production.

This feudal structure of landownership had its counterpart in the
towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of
trades. Here property consisted |sh.4| chiefly in the labour of each
individual. The necessity for associating against the association of the
robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age
when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing
competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the
feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about
the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual
craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing
population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice,
which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in
the country.

Thus property during the feudal epoch primarily consisted on the
one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on
the other of the personal labour of the individual who with his small
capital commands the labour of journeymen. The organisation of

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits,
presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.*

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at
first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourse of men — the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking,
the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct
efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental
production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws,
morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the
producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as
they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive
forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its
furthest forms.** Consciousness [das Bewusstsein ] can never be
anything else than conscious being [ das bewusste Seiri\, and the being
of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their
relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenome-
non arises just as much from their historical life-process as the
inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical
life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from
heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to
heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine,
conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined,
conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from
real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process
demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and
echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of
men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process,
which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as
the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The ideas which these
individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual
relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are
the conscious expression — real or illusory — of their real relations and activities, of
their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The
opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially
evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the
real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality
upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity
and their limited social relations arising from it.

** [The manuscript originally had:] Men are the producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc., and precisely men conditioned by the mode of production of their material
life, by their material intercourse and its further development in the social and political
structure.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no
development; but men, developing their material production and
their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world,
also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not
consciousness that determines life, but life that determines con-
sciousness. For the first manner of approach the starting-point is
consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second manner
of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living
individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their
consciousness.

This manner of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out
from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its
premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in
their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under
definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described,
history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as it is with the
empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of
imagined subjects, as with the idealists.

Where speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently
begins real, positive science, the expounding of the practical activity,
of the practical process of development of men. Empty phrases
about consciousness end, and real knowledge has to take their place.
When the reality is described, a self-sufficient philosophy [die
selbstandige Philosophie ] loses its medium of existence. At the best its
place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results,
abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical
development of men. These abstractions in themselves, divorced
from real history, have no value whatsoever. They can only serve to
facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the
sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or
schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history.
On the contrary, the difficulties begin only when one sets about the
examination and arrangement of the material — whether of a past
epoch or of the present — and its actual presentation. The removal of
these difficulties is governed by premises which certainly cannot be
stated here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and
the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We
shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in
contradistinction to ideology, and shall illustrate them by historical
examples.3

a The clean copy ends here. The text that follows in this edition are the three parts
of the rough copy of the manuscript. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

[II]

[1. PRECONDITIONS OF THE REAL LIBERATION OF MAN]

1 1 j We shall, of course, not take the trouble to explain to our wise
philosophers that the “liberation” of “man” is not advanced a single
step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the rubbish
to “self-consciousness” and by liberating “man” from the domina-
tion of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall.* Nor shall
we explain to them that it is possible to achieve real liberation only in
the real world and by real means, that slavery cannot be abolished
without the steam-engine and the mule jenny, serfdom cannot be
abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people
cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and
drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
“Liberation” is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought
about by historical conditions, the [level j of industry, com[merce],
[agriculture, [intercourse...]3 |2| then subsequently, in accordance
with the different stages of their development, [they make up] the
nonsense of substance, subject, self-consciousness and pure criticism,
as well as religious and theological nonsense, and later they get ricf of
it again when their development is sufficiently advanced.** In
Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is
taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and
ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of
historical development, and they take root and have to be combated.
But this fight is of local importance.***

[2. FEUERBACH’S CONTEMPLATIVE AND INCONSISTENT MATERIALISM]

[...]b 1 8 1 in reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the
communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of
practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in

* [Marginal notes by Marx:] Philosophic liberation and real liberation. — Man.
The unique. The individual. — Geological, hydrographical, etc., conditions. The human
body. Needs and labour.

** [Marginal note by Marx:] Phrases and real movement. The importance of
phrases in Germany.

*** [Marginal note by Marx:] Language is the language of re[ality].

a The manuscript is damaged here: the lower part of the sheet is torn off; one line
of the text is missing. — Ed.

Five pages of the manuscript are missing. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

existence. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach,
they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little
influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything
but embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’s “conception” of
the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere
contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he posits
“Man” instead of “real historical man”.14 “Man” is really “the
German”. In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world,
he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and
feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of
all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature.*
To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double
perception, a profane one which perceives “only the flatly obvious”
and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the “true essence”
of things. He does not see that the sensuous world around him is not
a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but
the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed [a
product] in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the
activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the
shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its
intercourse, and modifying its social system according to the
changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty”
are only given him through social development, industry and
commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees,
was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by
commerce into our zone, and therefore only |9J by this action of a
definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty”
for Feuerbach.

Incidentally, when things are seen in this way, as they really are
and happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as
will be seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical
fact. For instance, the important question of the relation of man to
nature (Bruno goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and
history” (p. 110),a as though these were two separate “things” and
man did not always have before him an historical nature and a

* NB. F[euerbach’s] error is not that he subordinates the flatly obvious, the
sensuous appearance to the sensuous reality established by detailed investigation of the
sensuous facts, but that he cannot in the last resort cope with the sensuous world
except by looking at it with the “eyes”, i.e., through the “spectacles”, of the
philosopher.

Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

natural history), which gave rise to all the “unfathomably lofty
works”3 on “substance” and “self-consciousness”, crumbles of itself
when we understand that the celebrated “unity of man with nature”
has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in
every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of
industry, and so has the “struggle” of man with nature, right up to
the development of his productive forces on a corresponding basis.
Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the
necessities of life in their turn determine distribution, the structure
of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined by it as to
the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that in
Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and
machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and
weaving-looms were to be seen, or in the Campagna di Roma he
finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus
he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman
capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of
natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the
eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be
without industry and commerce? Even this “pure” natural science is
provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and
industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is this
activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this produc-
tion, the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists
that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only
find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon
find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay
his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of
external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no 1 1 0 j
application to the original men produced by generatio aequivocd3; but
this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered
to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature
that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature
in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists
anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of
recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach
either.

1 9 1 Certainly Feuerbach has |10| a great advantage over the
“pure” materialists since he realises that man too is an “object of the

3 Paraphrase of a line from Goethe’s Faust, “Prolog im Himmel”. — Ed.
b Spontaneous generation. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

senses”. But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an
“object of the senses”, not as “sensuous activity”, because he still
remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their
given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life,
which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the actually
existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction “man”, and gets no
further than recognising “the actual, individual, corporeal man”
emotionally, i.e., he knows no other “human relations” “of man to
man” than love and friendship, and even then idealised. He gives no
criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to
conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the
individuals composing it; therefore when, for example, he sees
instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and
consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the
“higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the species”,
and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the
communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the
condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social
structure.

As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history,
and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him
materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally
already follows from what has been said.*

[3. PRIMARY HISTORICAL RELATIONS,

OR THE BASIC ASPECTS OF SOCIAL ACTIVITY:

PRODUCTION OF THE MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE,

PRODUCTION OF NEW NEEDS, REPRODUCTION OF MEN (THE FAMILY),
SOCIAL INTERCOURSE, CONSCIOUSNESS]

1 1 1 1 ** Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of
premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human
existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that
men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make
history”.3 But life involves before everything else eating and

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The reason why we
nevertheless discuss history here in greater detail is that the words “history” and
“historical” usually mean everything possible to the Germans except reality, a brilliant
example of this is in particular Saint Bruno with his “pulpit eloquence”.

** [Marginal note by Marx:] History.

See this volume, pp. 56-57. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

drinking, housing, clothing and various other things.* The first
historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these
needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an
historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as
thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in
order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is
reduced to a minimum, to a stick3 as with Saint Bruno, it
presupposes the action of producing this stick. Therefore in any
conception of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental
fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its
due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done
this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history
and consequently never a historian. The French and the English,
even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called
history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, especially since they
remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made
the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by
being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and
industry.16

The second point is [12] that the satisfaction of the first need, the
action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been
acquired, leads to new needs; and this creation of new needs is the
first historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual
ancestry of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when
they run out of positive material and when they can serve up neither
theological nor political nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not
history at all, but the “prehistoric age”. They do not, however,
enlighten us as to how we proceed from this nonsensical “prehis-
tory” to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their
historical speculation they seize upon this “prehistory” with especial
eagerness because they imagine themselves safe there from interfer-
ence on the part of “crude facts”, and, at the same time, because
there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up
and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.

The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into
historical development, is that men, who daily re-create their own life,
begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation

* [Marginal note by Marx:] Hegel Geological, hydrographical, etc., conditions.15
Human bodies. Needs, labour.

a See Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. Cf. this volume,
pp. 94, 104. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The
family, which to begin with is the only social relation, becomes later,
when increased needs create new social relations and the increased
population new needs, a subordinate one (except in Germany), and
must then be treated and analysed according to the existing empirical
data, not according to “the concept of the family”, as is the custom in
Germany.

These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken
as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear
to the Germans, three “moments”, which have existed simultaneous-
ly since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert
themselves in history today.

The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh
life in procreation, now appears as a twofold 1 13 1 relation: on the one
hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation — social in the
sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no
matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It
follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial
stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or
social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive
force”. Further, that the aggregate of productive forces accessible to
men determines the condition of society, hence, the “history of
humanity” must always be studied and treated in relation to the
history of industry and exchange. But it is also clear that in Germany
it is impossible to write this sort of history, because the Germans lack
not only the necessary power of comprehension and the material but
also the “sensuous certainty”, for across the Rhine one cannot have
any experience of these things since there history has stopped
happening. Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a
materialist connection of men with one another, which is determined
by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as
men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms,
and thus presents a “history” irrespective of the existence of any
political or religious nonsense which would especially hold men
together.

Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of
primary historical relations, do we find that man also possesses
“consciousness”.* But even from the outset this is not “pure”
consciousness. The “mind” is from the outset afflicted with 1 14 1 the

* [Marginal note by Marx:] Men have history because they must produce their life,
and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by
their physical organisation: their consciousness is determined in just the same way.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its
appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short,
of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is
practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and
only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness,
only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other
men.* Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal
does not “ relate ” itself to anything, it does not “ relate ” itself at all. For
the animal its relation to others does not exist as a relation.
Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social
product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is
at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate
sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection
with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing
self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which
first confronts men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassail-
able force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which
they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness
of nature (natural religion) precisely because nature is as yet hardly
altered by history — on the other hand, it is man’s consciousness of
the necessity of associating with the individuals around him, the
beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This
beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere
herd-consciousness, and at this point man is distinguished from
sheep only by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of
instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one.** This sheep-like or
tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension
through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is
fundamental to both of these, 1 15 1 the increase of population. With
these there develops the division of labour, which was originally
nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then the division
of labour which develops spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of
natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc.,
etc.*** Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment

* [The following words are crossed out in the manuscript:] My relation to my
surroundings is my consciousness.

** [Marginal note by Marx:] We see here immediately: this natural religion or this
particular attitude to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here,
as everywhere, the identity of nature and man also appears in such a way that the
restricted attitude of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one
another, and their restricted attitude to one another determines men’s restricted
relation to nature.

*** [Marginal note by Marx, which is crossed out in the manuscript:] Men’s
consciousness develops in the course of actual historical development.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

when a division of material and mental labour appears.* From this
moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is
something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really
represents something without representing something real; from
now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself trom the
world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology,
philosophy, morality, etc. But even if this theory, theology,
philosophy, morality, etc., come into contradiction with the existing
relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have
come into contradiction with existing productive forces; moreover,
in a particular national sphere of relations this can also occur
through the contradiction, arising not within the national orbit, but
between this national consciousness and the practice of other
nations,** i.e., between the national and the general consciousness of
a nation (as is happening now in Germany); but since this
contradiction appears to exist only as a contradiction within the
national consciousness, it seems to this nation that the struggle too is
confined to this |16| national muck, precisely because this nation
represents this muck as such.

Incidentally, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to
do on its own: out of all this trash we get only the one inference
that these three moments, the productive forces, the state of
society and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction
with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility,
nay the fact, that intellectual and material activity,*** that enjoyment
and labour, production and consumption, devolve on different
individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into
contradiction lies in negating in its turn the division of labour. It is
self-evident, moreover, that “spectres”, “bonds”, “the higher
being”, “concept”, “scruple”, are merely idealist, speculative, mental
expressions, the concepts apparently of the isolated individual, the
mere images of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which
move the mode of production of life, and the form of intercourse
coupled with it.****

* [Marginal note by Marx:] The first form of ideologists, priests, is coincident

** [Marginal note by Marx:] Religions. The Germans and ideology as such.

*** [Marginal note by Marx, which is crossed out in the manuscript:] activity
and thinking, i.e., action without thought and thought without action.

**** [The following sentence is crossed out in the manuscript:] This idealist
expression of actually present economic limitations exists not only purely theoretically
but also in the practical consciousness, i.e., consciousness which emancipates itself and
comes into contradiction with the existing mode of production devises not only
religions and philosophies but also states.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

[4. SOCIAL DIVISION OF LABOUR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES:

PRIVATE PROPERTY, THE STATE,

“ESTRANGEMENT” OF SOCIAL ACTIVITY]

The division of labour in which all these contradictions are
implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of
labour in the family and the separation of society into individual
families opposed to one another, simultaneously implies the
distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative
and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property, 1 1 7 1 the
nucleus, the first form of which lies in the family, where wife and
children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the
family, though still very crude, is the first form of property, but even
at this stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern
economists, who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of
others. Division of labour and private property are, after all,
identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with
reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the
product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour also implies the contradiction
between the interest of the separate individual or the individual
family and the common interest of all individuals who have
intercourse with one another. And indeed, this common interest
does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest”,
but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the
individuals among whom the labour is divided.3

Out of this very contradiction between the particular and the
common interests, the common interest assumes an independent
form as the state, which is divorced from the real individual and
collective interests, and at the same time as an illusory community,
always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family
conglomeration and tribal conglomeration — such as flesh and blood,
language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other inter-
ests— and especially, as we shall show later, on the classes, already
implied by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men
separate out, and one of which dominates all the others. It follows
from this that all struggles within the state, the struggle between
democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the fran-
chise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms — altogether the general

3 The following two paragraphs are written in the margin: the first by Engels and
the second by Marx. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

interest is the illusory form of common interests — in which the real
struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another
(of this the German theoreticians have not the faintest inkling,
although they have received a sufficient initiation into the subject in
the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher17 and Die heilige Familie). Further,
it follows that every class which is aiming at domination, even when its
domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition
of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination in general,
must first conquer political power in order to represent its interest
in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is
forced to do.

Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which
for them does not coincide with their common interest, the latter is
asserted as an interest “alien” [“fremd”] to them, and 1 1 8 1
“independent” of them, as in its turn a particular and distinctive
“general” interest; or they themselves must remain within this
discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the practical
struggle of these particular interests, which actually constantly run
counter to the common and illusory common interests, necessitates
practical intervention and restraint by the illusory “general” interest
in the form of the state.

1 1 7 1 And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example
of the fact that, as long as man remains in naturally evolved society,
that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the
common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but
naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed
to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as
soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a
particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and
from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a
shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want
to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where
nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I
have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd
or critic.

1 18 1 This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we
ourselves produce into a material power above us, growing out of
our, control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our
calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

till now.3 The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force,
which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is
caused by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since
their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not
as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside
them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they
thus are no longer able to control, which on the contrary passes
through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the
will and the action18 of man, nay even being the prime governor of
these. How otherwise could for instance property have had a history
at all, have taken on different forms, and landed property, for
example, according to the different premises given, have
proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands
of a few, in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to
parcellation, as is actually the case today? Or how does it happen that
trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products
of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through
the relation of supply and demand — a relation which, as an English
economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients,
and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up
empires |19| and wrecks empires, causes nations to rise and to
disappear — whereas with the abolition of the basis, private property,
with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this,
the abolition of the alien attitude [Fremdheit] of men to their own
product), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved
into nothing, and men once more gain control of exchange,
production and the way they behave to one another?

[5. DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
AS A MATERIAL PREMISE OF COMMUNISM]

[ 18 1 This “estrangement” [“ Entfremdung ”] (to use a term which
will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be
abolished given two practical premises. In order to become an
“unendurable” power, i.e., a power against which men make a revolu-
tion, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity
“propertyless”, and moreover in contradiction to an existing world
of wealth and culture; both these premises presuppose a great
increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.

a Here Marx added a passage in the margin which is given in this edition as the
first two paragraphs of Section 5. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces
(which at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men
in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely
necessary practical premise, because without it privation, want is
merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities
would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily
be restored; and furthermore, because only with this universal
development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between
men established, which on the one side produces in all nations
simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (univer-
sal competition), making each nation dependent on the revolutions
of the others, and finally puts world-historical, empirically universal
individuals in place of local ones. Without this, 1) communism could
only exist as a local phenomenon; 2) the forces of intercourse
themselves could not have developed as universal, hence unendurable
powers: they would have remained home-bred “conditions” sur-
rounded by superstition; and 3) each extension of intercourse would
abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible
as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously,19
which presupposes the universal development of productive forces
and the world intercourse bound up with them.*

[19 1 Moreover, the mass of workers who are nothing but
workers — labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from
even a limited satisfaction [of their needs] and, hence, as a result of
competition their utterly precarious position, the no longer merely
temporary loss of work as a secure source of life — presupposes the
world market. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just
as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical”
existence. World-historical existence of individuals, i.e., existence of
individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

1 1 8 1 Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We
call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state
of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now
existing premise.3

* * *

* [Above the continuation of this passage, which follows on the next page of the
manuscript, Marx wrote:] Communism.

3 In the manuscript this paragraph was written down by Marx in a free space
above the paragraph starting with the words: This “estrangement”. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

1 1 9| The form of intercourse determined by the existing
productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn
determining these, is civil society. The latter, as is clear from what we
have said above, has as its premise and basis the simple family
and the multiple, called the tribe, and the more precise definition of
this society is given in our remarks above. Already here we see that
this civil society is the true focus and theatre of all history, and
how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neg-
lects the real relations and confines itself to spectacular historical
events.20

In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human
activity, the reshaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the
reshaping of men by men. ... *

Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society.3

[6. CONCLUSIONS FROM THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION
OF HISTORY: HISTORY AS A CONTINUOUS PROCESS,

HISTORY AS BECOMING WORLD HISTORY,

THE NECESSITY OF COMMUNIST REVOLUTION]

1 20 1 History is nothing but the succession of the separate
generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the
productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations,
and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in
completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the
old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be
speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier
history, e.g., the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to
further the eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history
receives its own special goals and becomes “a person ranking with
other persons” (to wit: “self-consciousness, criticism, the unique”,
etc.), while what is designated with the words “destiny”, “goal”,
“germ”, or “idea” of earlier history is nothing more than an
abstraction from later history, from the active influence which earlier
history exercises on later history.

The further the separate spheres, which act on one another,
extend in the course of this development and the more the original
isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the advanced

* [Marginal note by Marx:] Intercourse and productive power.

a The end of this page of the manuscript is left blank. The next page begins with
an exposition of the conclusions from the materialist conception of history. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

mode of production, by intercourse and by the natural division of
labour Between various nations arising as a result, the more history
becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is
invented which deprives countless workers of bread in India and
China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires,
this invention becomes a world-historical fact. Or again, take the case
of sugar and coffee, which have proved their world-historical
importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack of
these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System,21
caused the Germans [21] to rise against Napoleon, and thus became
the real basis of the glorious Wars of Liberation of 1813. From this it
follows that this transformation of history into world history is by no
means a mere abstract act on the part of “self-consciousness”, the
world spirit, or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite
material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every
individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes
himself.

In history up to the present it is certainly likewise an empirical fact
that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity
into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under
a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a
dirty trick on the part of the so-called world spirit, etc.), a power
which has become more and more enormous and, in the last
instance, turns out to be the world market. But it is just as empirically
established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by
the communist revolution (of which more below) and the abolition of
private property which is identical with it, this power, which so
baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the
liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the
measure in which history becomes wholly transformed into world
history.* From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of
the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections.
Only this will liberate the separate individuals from the various
national and local barriers, bring them into practical connection with
the production (including intellectual production) of the whole
world and make it possible for them to acquire the capacity to enjoy
this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man).
All-round dependence, this primary natural form of the world-
historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by [22] this
communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of
these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have

[Marginal note by Marx:] On the production of consciousness.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

till now overawed and ruled men as powers completely alien to them.
Now this view can be expressed again in a speculative-idealistic, i.e.,
fantastic, way as “self-generation of the species” (“society as the
subject”), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individu-
als can be regarded as a single individual, which accomplishes the
mystery of generating itself. In this context it is evident that
individuals undoubtedly make one another, physically and mentally,
but do not make themselves, either in the nonsense of Saint Bruno,
or in the sense of the “unique”, of the “made” man.

Finally, from the conception of history set forth by us we obtain
these further conclusions: 1) In the development of productive
forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of
intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing
relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but
destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a
class is called forth which has to bear all the burdens of society
without enjoying its advantages, which is ousted from society and
[23] forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class
which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which
emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental
revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise
among the other classes too through the contemplation of the
situation of this class. 2) The conditions under which definite
productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a
definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its
property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the
form of the state and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is
directed against a class which till then has been in power.* 3) In all
previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained un-
changed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this
activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the
communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode
of activity, does away with labour,** and abolishes the rule of all
classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by
the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not
recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution
of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society; and 4) Both
for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness,

* [Marginal note by Marx:] These men are interested in maintaining the
present state of production.

** [The following words are crossed out in the manuscript:] the modern form of
activity under the rule of [...].

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass
scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a
practical movement, a revolution ; the revolution is necessary,
therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in
any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a
revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and
become fitted to found society anew.*

[7. SUMMARY OF THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION
OF HISTORY]

|24(This conception of history thus relies on expounding the real
process of production — starting from the material production of life
itself — ^and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with
and created by this mode of production, i.e., civil society in its various
stages, as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state,
and also explaining how all the different theoretical products and
forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc., etc., arise
from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that basis;
thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and
therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one
another). It has not, like the idealist view of history, to look for a
category in every period, but remains constantly on the real ground of

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Whereas all
communists in France as well as in England and Germany have long since agreed on
the necessity of the revolution, Saint Bruno quietly continues to dream, opining that
“real humanism”, i. e., communism, is to take “the place of spiritualism” (which has
no place) only in order that it may gain respect. Then, he continues in his dream,
“salvation” would indeed “be attained, the earth becoming heaven, and heaven
earth”. (The theologian is still unable to forget heaven.) “Then joy and bliss will
resound in celestial harmonies to all eternity” (p. 140). a The holy father of the
church will be greatly surprised when judgment day overtakes him, the day when all
this is to come to pass — a day when the reflection in the sky of burning cities will mark
the dawn, when together with the “celestial harmonies” the tunes of the Marseillaise
and Carmagnole will echo in his ears accompanied by the requisite roar of cannon, with
the guillotine beating time; when the infamous “masses” will shout fa ira, f a ira and
suspend “self-consciousness” by means of the lamp-post.22 Saint Bruno has no reason
at all to draw an edifying picture “of joy and bliss to all eternity”. We forego the
pleasure of a priori forecasting Saint Bruno’s conduct on judgment day. Moreover, it
is really difficult to decide whether the proletaires en revolution have to be conceived as
“substance”, as “mass”, desiring to overthrow' criticism, or as an “emanation” of the
spirit which is, however, still lacking the consistency necessary to digest Bauer’s ideas.

Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the
formation of ideas from material practice, and accordingly it comes to
the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be
dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness”
or transformation into “apparitions”, “spectres”, “whimsies”,3 etc.,
but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which
gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is
the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all
other kinds of theory. It shows that history does not end by being
resolved into “self-consciousness” as “spirit of the spirit”, b but that
each stage contains a material result, a sum of productive forces, a
historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one
another, which is handed down to each generation from its
predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and
circumstances, which on the one hand is indeed modified by the new
generation, but on the other also prescribes for it its conditions of life
and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that
circumstances make [25] men just as much as men make
circumstances.

This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of
intercourse, which every individual and every generation finds in
existence as something given, is the real basis of what the
philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man”,
and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in
the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of
men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as
“self-consciousness” and the “unique”. These conditions of life,
which different generations find in existence, determine also
whether or not the revolutionary convulsion periodically recurring
in history will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of everything
that exists. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are
not present — namely, on the one hand the existing productive
forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which
revolts not only against separate conditions of the existing society,
but against the existing “production of life” itself, the “total activity”
on which it was based — then it is absolutely immaterial for practical
development whether the idea of this revolution has been expres-
sed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves.

a These terms are used by Max Stirner in Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Cf.
pp. 157-63 of this volume. — Ed.

The terms are used by Bruno Bauer in “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuer-
bachs”.— Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

[8. THE INCONSISTENCY OF THE IDEALIST CONCEPTION
OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND OF GERMAN POST-HEGELIAN
PHILOSOPHY IN PARTICULAR]

In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis
of history has either been totally disregarded or else considered as a
minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must,
therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard;
the real production of life appears as non-historical, while the histori-
cal appears as something separated from ordinary life, something
extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is
excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history
is created. The exponents of this conception of history have
consequently only been able to see in history the spectacular political
events and religious and other theoretical struggles, and in particular
with regard to each historical epoch they were compelled to share the
illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be
actuated by purely ‘ political” or “religious” motives, although
“religion” and ‘ politics” are only forms of its true motives, the
historian accepts this opinion. The “fancy”, the “conception” of the
people in question about their real practice is transformed into the
soie determining and effective force, which dominates and deter-
mines their practice. When the crude form of the division of labour
which is to be found among the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the
caste-svstem in their state and religion, the historian believes that the
caste-system [26] is the power which has produced this crude social
form.

While the French and the English at least stick to the political
illusion, which is after all closer to reality, the Germans move in the
realm of the “pure spirit”, and make religious illusion the driving
force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last
consequence, reduced to its “clearest expression”, of all this German
historiography for which it is not a question of real, nor even of poli-
tical, interests, but of pure thoughts, which must therefore appear to
Saint Bruno as a series of “thoughts” that devour one another and
are finally swallowed up in “self-consciousness” *; and even more
consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner,
who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere “tale of knights,
robbers and ghosts”,24 from whose visions he can, of course, only save
himself by “unholiness”. This conception is truly religious: it
postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of

* [Marginal note by Marx:] So-called objective historiography23 consisted precisely
in treating the historical relations separately from activity. Reactionary character.

4—2086

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

history, and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies
in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of
life itself.

This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and
the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair
of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for
instance the important question which has been under discussion in
recent times: how exactly one “passes from the realm of God to the
realm of Man”3 — as if this “realm of God” had ever existed
anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen,
without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the “realm of
Man” to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned
pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this
theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrat-
ing its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is
altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense
they find into [27] some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all
this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really
it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the
actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these
phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of
men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circum-
stances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e.,
the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do
not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoret-
ical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by
circumstances.

The purely national character of these questions and solutions is
moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all
seriousness that chimeras like “the God-Man”, “Man”, etc., have
presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so
far as to assert that only “criticism and critics have made history”,1’
and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over
all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from
“Mongolism” c to history “with meaningful content”, that is to say, to
the history of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrhiicher and the
dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They
forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is

3 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Ueber das ‘Wesen des Christenthums’.;.”. — Ed.

Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.
c Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Cf. this volume, pp. 130-36. and
pp. 163-70. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of
“criticism”, “man”, and “the unique”.3 If for once these theorists
treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century,
they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the
practical development underlying them; and even that merely in
order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the
as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period
of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be
expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim
of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his
fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic
interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get
a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and
literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten
history of the eighteenth century. b These pompous and arrogant
hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all
national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the
beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not
recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germa-
ny, within Germany |28| and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-
song25 into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by
robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germani-
sing French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a
cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in
the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominan -
ce of Germany.

[9. IDEALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
AND FEUERBACH’S QUASI-COMMUNISM]

It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is
deceiving himself when (Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift , 1845, Band 2) by
virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a
communist,26 transforms the latter into a predicate of “Man”, and
thinks that it is thus possible to change the word “communist”,
which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolution-
ary party, into a mere category. Feuerbach’s whole deduction with
regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving
that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to

3 I. e., Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner. — Ed.
b Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklarung des achtzehnten Jahr-
hmiderts. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other
theorists, he merely wants to produce a correct consciousness about
an existing fact; whereas for the real Communist it is a question of
overthrowing the existing state of things. We fully appreciate,
however, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to produce consciousness
of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without
ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher. It is characteristic, however,
that Saint Bruno and Saint Max immediately put in place of the real
communist Feuerbach’s conception of the communist; they do this
partly in order to be able to combat communism too as “spirit of the
spirit”, as a philosophical category, as an equal opponent and, in the
case of Saint Bruno, also for pragmatic reasons.

As an example of Feuerbach’s acceptance and at the same time
misunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with our
opponents, we recall the passage in the Philosophic der Zukunft where
he develops the view that the being of a thing or a man is at the
same time its or his essence,3 that the determinate conditions of
existence, the mode of life and activity of an animal or human
individual are those in which its “essence” feels itself satisfied. Here
every exception is expressly conceived as an unhappy chance, as an
abnormality which cannot be altered. Thus if millions of proletarians
feel by no means contented with their' living conditions, if their
“being” |29| does not in the least correspond to their “essence”,
then, according to the passage quoted, this is an unavoidable
misfortune, which must be borne quietly. These millions of pro-
letarians or communists, however, think quite differently and will
prove this in time, when they bring their “being” into harmony
with their “essence” in a practical way, by means of a revolution.
Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such
cases, but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in
nature which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new
invention, every advance made by industry, detaches another piece
from this domain, so that the ground which produces examples
illustrating such Feuerbachian propositions is steadily shrinking.
The “essence” of the fish is its “being”, water — to go no further
than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the
water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish
and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the
river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and
other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its
water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the

a Cf. this volume, p. 13. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such
contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ
from the consolation which Saint Max Stirner offers to the
discontented, saying that this contradiction is their own contradiction
and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon they
should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to
themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as
little from Saint Brunos allegation that these unfortunate cir-
cumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the
muck of “substance”, ’nave not advanced to “absolute self-
consciousness”, and do not realise that these adverse conditions are
spirit of their spirit.'1

[Ill]

[I. THE RULING CLASS AND THE RULING IDEAS.

HOW THE HEGELIAN CONCEPTION OF THE DOMINATION
OF THE SPIRIT IN HISTORY AROSE]

1 30 i The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at
the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the
means of material production at its disposal, consequently also
controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of these
who iack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to
it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relations, the dominant material relations
grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one
ciass the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The
individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things
consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule
as a class and determine the extent and compass of an historical
epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence
among other tilings rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and
regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age:
thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an
age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie
are contending for domination and where, therefore, domination
is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be
the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law”.

The division of labour, which we already saw above (pp. [15-18])b
as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in

3 Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.
h See this volume, pp. 44-48. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the ruling class as the division of mental and [3 1 1 material labour, so
that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its
active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the
illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood),
while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive
and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this
class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about
themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a
certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, but whenever
a practical collision occurs in which the class itself is endangered they
automatically vanish, in which case there also vanishes the
appearance of the ruling ideas being not the ideas of the ruling class
and having a power distinct from the power of this class. The
existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes
the existence of a revolutionary class: about the premises of the
latter sufficient has already been said above (pp. [18-19, 22-23]).a

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of
the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an
independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or
those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering
ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of
these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions
which are the source of the ideas, then we can say, for instance, that
during the time the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour,
loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the
bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class
itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history,
which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth
century, will necessarily come up against [32] the phenomenon that
ever more abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly
take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself
in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to
carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest
of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has
to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only
rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes
forward from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class,
not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society, as the
whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.* It can do this

* [Marginal note by Marx:] (Universality corresponds to 1) the class versus the
estate, 2) the competition, world intercourse, etc., 3) the great numerical strength

a See this volume, pp. 48-49 and 52-53. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

because initially its interest really is as yet mostly connected with the
common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the
pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been
able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its
victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of other classes
which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now
enables these individuals to raise themselves into the ruling class.
When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the rule of the aristocra-
cy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise
themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they became
bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves domination only on
a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on the other
hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class
then develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these
things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this
new ruling class, in its turn, has as its aim a more decisive and more
radical negation of the previous conditions of society than [33] all
previous classes which sought to rule could have.

This whole appearance, that the rule of a certain class is only the
rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as
class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is
organised, that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to
represent a particular interest as general or the “general interest” as
ruling.

Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling
individuals and, above all, from the relations which result from a
given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion
has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is
very easy to abstract from these various ideas “the Idea”, the thought,
etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to consider all these
separate ideas and concepts as “forms of self-determination” of the
Concept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all
the relations of men can be derived from the concept of man, man as
conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by
speculative philosophy. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the
Geschichtsphilosophi ? that he “has considered the progress of the
concept only” and has represented in history the “true theodicy ”
(p. 446). Now one can go back again to the producers of “the con-

of the ruling class, 4) the illusion of the common interests, in the beginning this
illusion is true, 5) the delusion of the ideologists and the division of labour.)

? G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen Ober die Philosophic der Geschichte. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

cept”, to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes
then to the conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such,
have at all times been dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see,27
already expressed by Hegel.

The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history
(hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three
attempts.

j 34 1 No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for
empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as corporeal
individuals, from these rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or
illusions in history.

No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a
mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is
managed by regarding them as “forms of self-determination of the
concept” (this is possible because by virtue of their empirical basis
these ideas are really connected with one another and because,
conceived as mere ideas, they become self-distinctions, distinctions
made by thought).

No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this “self-
determining concept” it is changed into a person — “self-
consciousness” — or, to appear thoroughly materialistic, into a series
of persons, who represent the “concept” in history, into the
“thinkers”, the “philosophers”, the ideologists, who again are
understood as the manufacturers of history, as the “council of
guardians”, as the rulers.* Thus the whole body of materialistic
elements has been eliminated from history and now full rein can be
given to the speculative steed.

This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especiallv
the reason why, must be explained from its connection with the
illusion of ideologists in general, e.g., the illusions of the jurists,
politicians (including the practical statesmen), from the dogmatic
dreamings and distortions of these fellows; this is explained
perfectly easily from then practical position in life, their job,
and the division of labour.

1 35 1 Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper3 is very well able to
distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he
really is, our historiography has not yet won this trivial insight. It takes
every epoch at its word and believes that everything it says and
imagines about itself is true.

* [Marginal note by Marx:] Man = the “thinking human spirit”.

3 This word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

[IV]

[1. INSTRUMENTS OF PRODUCTION
AND FORMS OF PROPERTY]

[...]a 1 40 1 From the first point, there follows the premise of a highly
developed division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the
second, the locality. In the first case the individuals must have been
brought together, in the second they are instruments of production
alongside the given instrument of production.

Here, therefore, emerges the difference between natural instru-
ments of production and those created by civilisation. The field
(water, etc.) can be regarded as a natural instrument of production.
In the first case, that of the natural instrument of production,
individuals are subservient to nature; in the second, to a product of
labour. In the first case, therefore, property (landed property)
appears as direct natural domination, in the second, as domination
of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The first case
presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family,
tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent of
one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first
case, what is involved is chiefly an exchange between men and nature
in which the labour of the former is exchanged for the products of
the latter; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men
among themselves. In the first case, average human common sense is
adequate — physical activity and mental activity are not yet separated;
in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must
already have been effected in practice. In the first case, the
domination of the proprietor over the propertyless may be based on
personal relations, on a kind of community; in the second, it must
have taken on a material shape in a third party — money. In the first
case, small-scale industry exists, but determined by the utilisation of
the natural instrument of production and therefore without the
distribution of labour among various individuals; in the second,
industry exists only in and through the division of labour.

1 4 1 1 Our investigation hitherto started from the instruments of
production, and it has already shown that private property was a
necessity for certain industrial stages. In industrie extractive28 private
property still coincides with labour; in small-scale industry and all
agriculture up till now property is the necessary consequence of the
existing instruments of production; the contradiction between the
instrument of production and private property is only the product of

Four pages of the manuscript are missing. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

large-scale industry, which, moreover, must be highly developed to
produce this contradiction. Thus only with large-scale industry does
the abolition of private property become possible.

[2. THE DIVISION OF MATERIAL AND MENTAL LABOUR.

SEPARATION OF TOWN AND COUNTRY.

THE GUILD-SYSTEM]

The most important division of material and mental labour is the
separation of town and country. The contradiction between town
and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation,
from tribe to state, from locality to nation, and runs through the
whole history of civilisation to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law
League29).

The advent of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of
administration, police, taxes, etc., in short, of the municipality [des
Gemeindewesens], and thus of politics in general. Here first became
manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is
directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of
production. The town is in actual fact already the concentration of the
population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures,
of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact,
isolation and separation. The contradiction between town and
country can only exist within the framework of private property. It is
the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the
division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him — a
subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal,
another into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the
conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing,
power over individuals, and as long as this power exists, private
property must exist. The abolition of the contradiction between town
and country is one of the first conditions |42J of communal life, a
condition which again depends on a mass of material premises and
which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the
first glance. (These conditions have still to be set forth.) The
separation of town and country can also be understood as the
separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the
existence and development of capital independent of landed
property — the beginning of property having its basis only in labour
and exchange.

In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made
from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

become free, the particular labour of each man was his only property
apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost
solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of
serfs constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the
country against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised
municipal military force, the bond of common ownership in a
particular kind of labour, the necessity of common buildings for the
sale of their wares at a time when craftsmen were also traders, and
the consequent exclusion of the unauthorised from these buildings,
the conflict among the interests of the various crafts, the necessity of
protecting their laboriously acquired skill, and the feudal organisa-
tion of the whole of the country: these were the causes of the union
of the workers of each craft in guilds. In this context we do not have
to go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system,
which arise through later historical developments. The flight of the
serfs into the towns went on without interruption right through the
Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the country,
came separately into the towns, where they found an organised
community, against which they were powerless and in which they
had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the
demand for their labour and the interest of their organised urban
competitors. These workers, entering separately, were never able to
attain to any power, since, if their labour was of the guild type which
had to be learned, the guildmasters bent them to their will and
organised them according to their interest; or if their labour was not
such as had to be learned, and therefore not of the guild type, they
were day-labourers, never managed to organise, but remained an
unorganised rabble. The need for day-labourers in the towns created
the rabble.

These towns were true “unions”,30 called forth by the direct |43|
need of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying
the means of production and defence of the separate members. The
rabble of these towns was devoid of any power, composed as it was of
individuals strange to one another who had entered separately, and
who stood unorganised over against an organised power, armed for
war, and jealously watching, over them. The journeymen and
apprentices were organised in each craft as it best suited the interest
of the masters. The patriarchal relations existing between them
and their masters gave the latter a double power — on the one hand
because of the direct influence they exerted on the whole life of the
journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen who
worked with the same master, it was a real bond which held them
together against the journeymen of other masters and separated

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to the
existing order even by their interest in becoming masters themselves.
While, therefore, the rabble at least carried out revolts against the
whole municipal order, revolts which remained completely ineffec-
tive because of its powerlessness, the journeymen never got further
than small acts of insubordination within separate guilds, such as
belong to the very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of
the Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained
totally ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of
the peasants.31 —

Capital in these towns was a naturally evolved capital, consisting of
a house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers;
and not being realisable, on account of the backwardness of
intercourse and the lack of circulation, it had to be handed down from
father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can be assessed in money
and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or that, this
capital was directly connected with the particular work of the owner,
inseparable from it and to this extent estate capital. —

In the towns, the division of labour between the [44] individual
guilds was as yet very little developed and, in the guilds themselves,
it did not exist at all between the individual workers. Every workman
had to be versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make
everything that was to be made with his tools. The limited intercourse
and the weak ties between the individual towns, the lack of population
and the narrow needs did not allow of a more advanced division of
labour, and therefore every man who wished to become a master had
to be proficient in the whole of his craft. Medieval craftsmen therefore
had an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was
capable of rising to a limited artistic sense. For this very reason,
however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his
work, to which he had a complacent servile relationship, and in which
he was involved to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose
work is a matter of indifference to him. —

[3. FURTHER DIVISION OF LABOUR.
SEPARATION OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY.
DIVISION OF LABOUR BETWEEN THE VARIOUS TOWNS.
MANUFACTURE]

The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of
production and intercourse, the formation of a special class of
merchants; a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a former

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

period, had been handed down (among other things with the Jews)
and which very soon appeared in the newly formed ones. With this
there was given the possibility of commercial communications
transcending the immediate neighbourhood, a possibility the
realisation of which depended on the existing means of
communication, the state of public safety in the countryside, which
was determined by political conditions (during the whole of the
Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants travelled in armed
caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced needs (determined by
the stage of culture attained) of the region accessible to intercourse.

With intercourse vested in a particular class, with the extension of
trade through the merchants beyond the immediate surroundings of
the town, there immediately appears a reciprocal action between
production and intercourse. The towns enter into relations with one
another, new tools are brought from one town into the other, and the
separation between production and intercourse soon calls forth a new
division of production between |45| the individual towns, each of
which is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local
restrictions of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down. —

It depends purely on the extension of intercourse whether the
productive forces evolved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost
for later development or not. As long as there exists no intercourse
transcending the immediate neighbourhood, every invention must be
made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions
of barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a
country with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start
right over again from the beginning. In primitive history every
invention had to be made daily anew and in each locality
independently. That even with a relatively very extensive commerce,
highly developed productive forces are not safe from complete
destruction, is proved by the Phoenicians, whose inventions were for
the most part lost for a long time to come through the ousting of this
nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent
decline. Likewise, for instance, glass staining in the Middle Ages. Only
when intercourse has become world intercourse and has as its basis
large-scale industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive
struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces
assured. —

The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the
various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of production
which had outgrown the guild-system. Intercourse with foreign
nations was the historical premise for the first flourishing of
manufactures, in Italy and later in Flanders. In other countries,

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

England and France for example, manufactures were at first confined
to the home market. Besides the premises already mentioned
manufactures presuppose an already advanced concentration of
population, particularly in the countryside, and of capital, which
began to accumulate in the hands of individuals, partly in the guilds in
spite of the guild regulations, partly among the merchants.

1 46) The kind of labour which from the first presupposed
machines, even of the crudest sort, soon showed itself the most
capable of development. Weaving, earlier carried on in the country
by the peasants as a secondary occupatign to procure their clothing,
was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further development
through the extension of intercourse. Weaving was the first
and remained the principal manufacture. The rising demand for
clothing materials, consequent on the growth of population, the
growing accumulation and mobilisation of natural capital through
accelerated circulation, and the demand for luxuries called forth by
this and favoured generally by the gradual extension of inter-
course, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus, which
wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing.
Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, who continued,
and still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class
of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the whole
home market and usually for foreign markets too.

Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and
soon splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted
the trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly
in villages and market centres, without guild organisation, which
gradually became towns, and indeed the most flourishing towns in
each land.

With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly
changed. The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital
was provided by the rise of merchants, whose capital was from the
beginning movable, capital in the modern sense as far as one can
speak of it, given the circumstances of those times. The second
advance came with manufacture, which again mobilised a mass of
natural capital, and altogether increased the mass of movable capital
as against that of natural capital.

At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants
from the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly, just as
earlier the guild-towns had served the peasants as a refuge |47| from
the landlords. —

Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a
period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

of retainers, the disbanding of the armies consisting of a motley
crowd that served the kings against their vassals, the improvement of
agriculture, and the transformation of large strips of tillage into
pasture land. From this alone it is clear that this vagabondage is
strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal system. As
early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind,
but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth
does this vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance.
These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry
VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged,32 were only prevailed
upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most
extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise
of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them
gradually. —

With the advent of manufacture the various nations entered into
competitive relations, a commercial struggle, which was fought
out in wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the
nations, insofar as they were connected at all, had carried on an
inoffensive exchange with each other. Trade had from now on a
political significance.

With the advent of manufacture the relations between worker
and employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relations
between journeyman and master continued to exist; in manufacture
their place was taken by the monetary relations between worker and
capitalist — relations which in the countryside and in small towns
retained a patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, the real manufacturing
towns, quite early lost almost all patriarchal complexion.

Manufacture and the movement of production in general received
an enormous impetus through the extension of intercourse which
came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East
Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of
gold and silver which came into circulation, had totally changed the
position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to
feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of
adventurers, colonisation, and above all the extension of markets
into a world market, which had now become possible and was
daily becoming more and more a fact, called forth a new phase 1 48 1 of
historical development, into which in general we need not here enter
further. Through the colonisation of the newly discovered countries
the commercial struggle of the nations against one another was given
new fuel and accordingly greater extension and animosity.

The expansion of commerce and manufacture accelerated the
accumulation of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

stimulated to extend their production, natural capital remained
stationary or even declined. Commerce and manufacture created the
big bourgeoisie; in the guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie,
which no longer was dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to
bow to the might of the great merchants and manufacturers.* Hence
the decline of the guilds, as soon as they came into contact with
manufacture.

The relations between nations in their intercourse took on two
different forms in the epoch of which we have been speaking. At first
the small quantity of gold and silver in circulation occasioned the ban
on the export of these metals; and industry, made necessary by the
need for employing the growing urban population and for the most
part imported from abroad, could not do without privileges which
could be granted not only, of course, against home competition, but
chiefly against foreign. The local guild privilege was in these original
prohibitions extended over the whole nation. Customs duties
originated from the tributes which the feudal lords exacted from
merchants passing through their territories as protection money
against robbery, tributes later imposed likewise by the towns, and
which, with the rise of the modern states, were the Treasury’s most
obvious means of raising money.

The appearance of American gold and silver on the European
markets, the gradual development of industry, the rapid expansion
of trade and the consequent rise of the non-guild bourgeoisie and
the increasing importance of money, gave these measures another
significance. The state, which was daily less and less able to do
without money, now retained the ban on the export of gold and
silver out of fiscal considerations; the bourgeois, for whom these
quantities of money which were hurled on to the market became the
chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly content with this;
privileges established earlier became a source of income for the
government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation
there appeared export duties which, since they only hampered
industry, 1 49 j had a purely fiscal aim. —

The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century
and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and
navigation had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which
played a secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable
consumers; and after long struggles the various nations shared out
the opening world market among themselves. This period begins
with the Navigation Laws33 and colonial monopolies. The competi-

[Marginal note by Marx:] Petty bourgeoisie — Middle class — Big bourgeoisie.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

tion of the nations among themselves was excluded as far as possible
by tariffs, prohibitions and treaties; and in the last resort the
competitive struggle was carried on and decided by wars (especially
naval wars). The mightiest maritime nation, the English, retained
preponderance in commerce and manufacture. Here, already, we
find concentration in one country.

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the
home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as
much as possible by differential duties. The working-up of
home-produced material was encouraged (wool and linen in
England, silk in France), the export of home-produced raw material
forbidden (wool in England), and the [working-upl of imported raw
material neglected or suppressed (cotton in England). The natioii
dominant in maritime trade and colonial power naturally secured for
itself also the greatest quantitative and qualitative expansion of
manufacture. Manufacture could not be carried on without protec-
tion, since, if the slightest change takes place in other countries, it can
lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably favourable
conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for this
very reason can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the
mode in which it is carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century
in the countryside, it is to such an extent interwoven with the
conditions of life of a great mass of individuals, that no country dare
jeopardise their existence by permitting free competition. Conse-
quently, insofar as manufacture manages to export, it depends
entirely on the extension or restriction of commerce, and exercises a
relatively very small reaction (on the latter]. Hence its secondary
[role] and the influence of [the merchants] in the eighteenth century.

1 50] It was the merchants and especially the shipowners who more
than anybody else Dressed for state protection and monopolies; the
manufacturers also demanded and indeed received protection, but
all the time were inferior in political importance to the merchants.
The commercial towns, particularlv the maritime towns, became to
some extent civilised and acquired the outlook of the big bourgeoisie,
but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois outlook
persisted. Cf. Aikin, etc.a The eighteenth century was the century of
trade. Pinto says this expressly: “Le commerce fait la marotte du siecle,,;b

a John Aikin, A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round
Man Chester. — Ed.

b “Commerce is the rage of the century.” Isaac Pinto, “Lettre sur la jalousie du
commerce” (published in Pinto’s book Traite de la circulation et du credit). — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

and: “ depuis quelque temps il n’est plus question que de commerce, de
navigation et de marine”3

The movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still
remained, however, relatively slow. The splitting-up of the world
market into separate parts, each of which was exploited by a
particular nation, the prevention of competition between the
different nations, the clumsiness of production and the fact that
finance was only evolving from its early stages, greatly impeded
circulation. The consequence of this was a haggling, mean and
niggardly spirit which still clung to all merchants and to the whole
mode of carrying on trade. Compared with the manufacturers, and
above all with the craftsmen, they were certainly big bourgeois;
compared with the merchants and industrialists of the next period
they remain petty bourgeois. Cf. Adam Smith .b —

This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the
export of gold and silver and the beginning of money trade, banks,
national debts, paper money, speculation in stocks and shares,
stockjobbing in all articles and the development of finance in
general. Again capital lost a great part of the natural character which
had still clung to it.

[4. MOST EXTENSIVE DIVISION OF LABOUR.

LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY]

The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country,
England, developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradual-
ly created for this country a relative world market, and thus a
demand for the manufactured products of this country which could
no longer be met by the industrial productive forces hitherto
existing. This demand, outgrowing the productive forces, was the
motive power which, by producing large-scale industry — the
application of elemental forces to industrial ends, machinery and the
most extensive division of labour — called into existence the third 1 5 1 1
period of private property since the Middle Ages. There already
existed in England the other preconditions of this new phase:
freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of
theoretical mechanics, etc. (indeed, mechanics, perfected by Newton,
was altogether the most popular science in France and England in the
eighteenth century). (Free competition inside the nation itself had

a “For some time now people have been talking only about commerce, navigation
and the navy” (ibid.). — Ed.

b Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

everywhere to be won by a revolution — 1640 and 1688 in England,
1789 in France.)

Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain
its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs
regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against
large-scale industry) and soon after to introduce large-scale industry
under protective duties. In spite of these protective measures
large-scale industry universalised competition (it is practical free
trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence
within free trade), established means of communication and the
modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all
capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid
circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisa-
tion of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to
strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible
ideology, religion, morality, etc., and, where it could not do this,
made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first
time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual
member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the
whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of
separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and
took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural
character. It altogether destroyed the natural character, as far as this
is possible with regard to labour, and resolved all natural relations
into money relations. In the place of naturally grown towns
it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up
overnight. It destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry
wherever it gained mastery. It completed the victory of the town
over the country. Its [basis] is the automatic system. It produced
a mass of productive forces, for which private property became
just as much a fetter [52 j as the guild had been for manufacture and
the small, rural workshop for the developing handicrafts. These
productive forces receive under the system of private property a
one-sided development only, and for the majority they become
destructive forces; moreover, a great many of these forces can find
no application at all within the system of private property. Generally
speaking, large-scale industry created everywhere the same relations
between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar
features of the various nationalities. And finally, while the
bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests,
large-scale industry created a class which in all nations has the same
interest and for which nationality is already dead; a class which is
really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

against it. For the worker it makes not only his relation to the
capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable.

It is evident that large-scale industry does not reach the same level
of development in all districts of a country. This does not, however,
retard the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians
created by large-scale industry assume leadership of this movement
and carry the whole mass along with them, and because the workers
excluded from large-scale industry are placed by it in a still worse
situation than the workers in large-scale industry itself. The countries
in which large-scale industry is developed act in a similar manner
upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as the latter
are swept by world intercourse into the universal competitive struggle.

* * *

These different forms [of production] are just so many forms of the
organisation of labour, and hence of property. In each period a
unification of the existing productive forces takes place, insofar as this
has been rendered necessary by needs.

[5. THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
AND THE FORM OF INTERCOURSE AS THE BASIS
OF SOCIAL REVOLUTION]

The contradiction between the productive forces and the form of
intercourse, which, as we saw, has occurred several times in past
history, without, however, endangering its basis, necessarily on each
occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various
subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of
various classes, contradictions of consciousness, battle of ideas,
political struggle, etc. From a narrow point of view one may isolate
one of these subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these
revolutions; and this is all the more easy as the individuals who
started the revolutions had illusions about their own activity
according to their degree of culture and the stage of historical
development.

Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our
view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the
form 1 53 1 of intercourse. Incidentally, to lead to collisions in a

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

country, this contradiction need not necessarily have reached its
extreme limit in that particular country. The competition with
industrially more advanced countries, brought about by the expan-
sion of international intercourse, is sufficient to produce a similar
contradiction in countries with a less advanced industry (e.g., the
latent proletariat in Germany brought into more prominence by the
competition of English industry).

[6. COMPETITION OK INDIVIDUALS
AND THE FORMATION OF CLASSES.

CONTRADICTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR CONDITIONS
OF LIFE. THE ILLUSORY COMMUNITY
OF INDIVIDUALS IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY AND THE REAL UNION
OF INDIVIDUALS UNDER COMMUNISM.

SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF LIFE
TO THE POWER OF THE UNITED INDIVIDUALS]

Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the
bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings
them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can
unite, apart from the fact that for the purpose of this union — if it is
not to be merely local — the necessary means, the big industrial cities
and cheap and quick communications, have first to be produced by
large-scale industry. Hence every organised power standing over
against these isolated individuals, who live in conditions daily
reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles.
To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that
competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history, or that
the individuals should banish from their minds conditions over
which in their isolation they have no control.

The building of houses. With savages each family has as a matter
of course its own cave or hut like the separate family tent of the
nomads. This separate domestic economy is made only the more
necessary by the further development of private property. With the
agricultural peoples a communal domestic economy is just as
impossible as a communal cultivation of the soil. A great advance was
the building of towns. In all previous periods, however, the abolition
[ Aufhebung\a of individual economy, which is inseparable from the

a Aufhebung — a term used by Hegel to denote the negation of an old form while
preserving its positive content in the new, which supersedes it. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

abolition of private property, was impossible for the simple reason
that the material conditions required were not present. The setting
up of a communal domestic economy presupposes the development
of machinery, the use of natural forces and of many other productive
forces — e.g., of water-supplies, 1 54 1 gas-lighting, steam-heating, etc.,
the supersession [ Aufhebung ] of town and country. Without these
conditions a communal economy would not in itself form a new
productive force; it would lack material basis and rest on a purely
theoretical foundation, in other words, it would be a mere freak and
would amount to nothing more than a monastic economy. — What was
possible can be seen in the towns brought into existence by
concentration and in the construction of communal buildings for
various definite purposes {prisons, barracks, etc.). That the
supersession of individual economy is inseparable from the
supersession of the family is self-evident.

(The statement which frequently occurs with Saint Sancho that
each man is all that he is through the state3 is fundamentally the
same as the statement that the bourgeois is only a specimen of the
bourgeois species; a statement which presupposes that the bourgeois
class existed before the individuals constituting it.*)

In the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to
unite against the landed nobility to defend themselves. The extension
of trade, the establishment of communications, led separate towns to
establish contacts with other towns, which had asserted the same
interests in the struggle with the same antagonist. Out of the
many local communities of citizens in the various towns there arose
only gradually the middle class. The conditions of life of the individual
citizens became — on account of their contradiction to the existing
relations and of the mode of labour determined by this — conditions
which were common to them all and independent of each individual.
The citizens created these conditions insofar as they had torn
themselves free from feudal ties, and were in their turn created by
them insofar as they were determined by their antagonism to the
feudal system which they found in existence. With the setting up of
intercommunications between the individual towns, these common
conditions developed into class conditions. The same conditions, the
same contradiction, the same interests were bound to call forth on the

* [Marginal note by Marx:] With the philosophers pre-existence of the class.

Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

whole similar customs everywhere. The bourgeoisie itself develops
only gradually together with its conditions, splits according to the
division of labour into various sections and finally absorbs all
propertied classes it finds in existence * (while it develops the majority
of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied classes
into a new class, the proletariat) in the measure to which all property
found in existence is transformed into industrial or commercial
capital.

The separate individuals form a class only insofar as [551 they have
to carry on a common battle against another class; in other respects
they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the
other hand, the class in its turn assumes an independent existence as
against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of
life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence
their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus
becoming subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as the
subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labour and
can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of
labour* itself. We have already indicated several times that this
subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it their
subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc.

If this development of individuals, which proceeds within the com-
mon conditions of existence of estates and classes, historically follo-
wing one another, and the general conceptions thereby forced upon
them — if this development is considered from a philosophical point of
view, it is certainly verv easy to imagine that in these individuals the
species, or man, has evolved, or that they evolved man — and in this
way one can give history some hard clouts on the ear. One can then
conceive these various estates and classes to be specific terms of the
general expression, subordinate varieties of the species, or evolu-
tionary phases of man.

This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be
abolished until a class has evolved which has no longer any particular
class interest to assert against a ruling ciass.

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal
powers (relations) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by

* [Marginal note by Marx:] To begin with, it absorbs the branches of labour
directly belonging to the state and then all — [more or less] ideological professions.

a Regarding the meaning of “abolition of labour” f Aufhebung der Arbeit) see this
volume, pp. 52-53, 80, 85-89. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be
abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers
to themselves and abolishing the division of labour.* This is not
possible without the community. Only within the community has
each individual 1 56 1 the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions;
hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the communi-
ty. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the state,
etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who
developed under the conditions of the ruling class, and only inso-
far as they were individuals of this class. The illusory commu-
nity in which individuals have up till now combined always took
on an independent existence in relation to them, and since it
was the combination of one class over against another, it was at
the same time for the oppressed class not only a completely illu-
sory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community
the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their asso-
ciation.

Individuals have always proceeded from themselves, but of course
from themselves within their given historical conditions and
relations, not from the “pure” individual in the sense of the ideolo-
gists. But in the course of historical development, and precisely
through the fact that within the division of labour social relations
inevitably take on an independent existence, there appears a cleavage
in the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar
as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions
pertaining to it. (We do not mean it to be understood from this that,
for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc., cease to be persons; but
their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite
class relations, and the cleavage appears only in their opposition
to another class and, for themselves, only when they go bankrupt.) In
the estate (and even more in the tribe) this is as yet concealed: for
instance, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner
always a commoner, a quality inseparable from his individuality
irrespective of his other relations. The difference between the private
individual and the class individual, the accidental nature of the
conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence
of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental
character as such is only engendered and developed |57| by
competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus,
in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the

* [Marginal note by Engels:] (Feuerbach: being and essence). [Cf. this volume,
pp. 58-59.]— Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem
accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a
greater extent governed by material forces. The difference from the
estate comes out particularly in the antagonism between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the estate of the urban
burghers, the corporations, etc., emerged in opposition to the landed
nobility, their condition of existence — movable property and craft
labour, which had already existed latently before their separation
from the feudal institutions — appeared as something positive, which
was asserted against feudal landed property, and, therefore, in its own
way at first took on a feudal form. Certainly the fugitive serfs treated
their previous servitude as something extraneous to their personality.
But here they only were doing what every class that is freeing itself
from a fetter does; and they did not free themselves as a class but
individually. Moreover, they did not break loose from the system of
estates, but only formed a new estate, retaining their previous
mode of labour even in their new situation, and developing it further
by freeing it from its earlier fetters, which no longer corresponded to
the development alreadv attained.

For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their
life, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence of modern
society, have become something extraneous, something over
which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over
which no social organisation can give them control. The contra-
diction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and
labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to
him, for he is sacrificed from youth onwards and, within his own
class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place
him in the other class. —

1 58 1 NB. It must not be forgotten that the serfs very need of
existing and the impossibility of a large-scale economy involved the
distribution of allotments3 among the serfs and very soon reduced
the services of the serfs to their lord to an average of payments in
kind and labour-services. This made it possible for the serf to
accumulate movable property and hence facilitated his escape from
his lord and gave him the prospect of making his way as a townsman;
it also created gradations among the serfs, so that the runaway serfs
were already half burghers. It is likewise obvious that the serfs who
were versed in a craft had the best chance of acquiring movable
property. —

3 This word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Thus, while the fugitive serfs only wished to have full scope to
develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already
there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the
proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, have to
abolish the hitherto prevailing condition of their existence (which
has, moreover, been that of all society up to then), namely, labour.
Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which,
hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given
themselves collective expression, that is, the state; in order,
therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow
the state.

It follows from all we have been saying up till now that* the
communal relation into which the individuals of a class entered,
and which was determined by their common interests as against a
third party, was always a community to which these individuals
belonged only as average individuals, only insofar as they lived
within the conditions of existence of their class — a relation in
which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class.
With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other
hand, who take their conditions 1 59 1 of existence and those of all
members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as
individuals that the individuals participate in it. For it is the
association of individuals (assuming the advanced stage of modern
productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions of the free
development and movement of individuals under their con-
trol— conditions which were previously left to chance and had
acquired an independent existence over against the separate
individuals precisely because of their separation as individuals and
because their inevitable association, which was determined by the
division of labour, had, as a result of their separation, become for
them an alien bond. Up till now association (by no means an arbitrary
one, such as is expounded for example in the Contrat social* but a
necessary one) was simply an agreement about those conditions,
within which the individuals were free to en joy the freaks of fortune
(compare, e.g., the formation of the North American state and the
South American republics). This right to the undisturbed enjoyment,

* [The following is crossed out in the manuscript:] the individuals who freed
themselves in any historical epoch merely developed further the conditions of
existence which were already present and which they found in existence.

jean Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has up till now been
called personal freedom. — These conditions of existence are, of
course, only the productive forces and forms of intercourse at any
particular time.

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it
overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and
intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally
evolved premises as the creations of hitherto existing men, strips
them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of
the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially
economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it
turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality which
communism creates is precisely the true basis for rendering it
impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals,
insofar as reality is nevertheless only a product of the preceding
intercourse of individuals. Thus the Communists in practice treat the
conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as
inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the
plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material,
and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the
individuals creating them.

[7. CONTRADICTION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS
AND THEIR CONDITIONS OF LIFE AS CONTRADICTION
BETWEEN THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES AND THE FORM
OF INTERCOURSE. DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
AND THE CHANGING FORMS OF INTERCOURSE]

[60] The difference between the individual as a person and what-
ever is extraneous to him is not a conceptual difference but a histo-
rical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different
times — e.g., the estate as someting extraneous to the individual in the
eighteenth century, and so too, more or less, the family. It is not a
distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which each
age itself makes from among the different elements which it finds in
existence, and indeed not according to any idea, but compelled by
material collisions in life.

What appears accidental to a later age as opposed to an earlier —
and this applies also to the elements handed down by an earlier
age — is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

stage of development of the productive forces. The relation of the
productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the
form of intercourse to the occupation or activity of the indi-
viduals. (The fundamental form of this activity is, of course,
material, on which depend all other forms — mental, political,
religious, etc. The different forms of material life are, of course, in
every case dependent on the needs which are already developed, and
the production, as well as the satisfaction, of these needs is an
historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or a dog
(Stirner’s refractory principal argument3 adversus hominem), al-
though sheep and dogs in their present form certainly, but in spite of
themselves, are products of an historical process). The conditions
under which individual:* have intercourse with each other, so long as
this contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their
individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which
alone these definite individuals, living under definite relations,
can produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus
the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this
self-activity.* The definite condition under which they produce thus
corresponds, as long as (61 J the contradiction has not yet appeared,
to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence,
the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the
contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists solely for those
who live later. Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter,
and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age
as well.

These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of
self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole development of
history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of
which consists in this: an earlier form of intercourse, which has
become a fetter, is replaced by a new- one corresponding to the more
developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of
the self-activity of individuals — a form which in its turn becomes a
fetter and is then replaced by another. Since these conditions
correspond at every stage to the simultaneous development of the
productive forces, their history is at the same time the history of the
evolving productiv e forces taken over by each new generation, and is
therefore the history of the development of the forces of the
individuals themselves.

* [Marginal note by Marx:] Production of the form of intercourse itself.

a Cf. Max Stirner. “Recensenten Stirners”, and also this volume, pp. 95-96. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

Since this development takes place spontaneously, i.e., is not
subordinated to a general plan of freely combined individuals, it
proceeds from various localities, tribes, nations, branches of labour,
etc., each of which to start with develops independently of the others
and only gradually enters into relation with the others. Furthermore,
this development proceeds only very slowly; the various stages and
interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to
the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries
afterwards. It follows from this that even within a nation the
individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have
quite diverse developments, and that an earlier interest, the peculiar
form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that
belonging to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in
possession of a traditional power in the illusory community (state,
law), which has won an existence independent of the individuals; a
power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution.
This explains why, with reference to individual points [62] which
allow of a more general summing-up, consciousness can sometimes
appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical condi-
tions, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier
theoreticians as authorities.

On the other hand, in countries like North America, which start
from scratch in an already advanced historical epoch, the develop-
ment proceeds very rapidly. Such countries have no other natural
premises than the individuals who have settled there and were led to
do so because the forms of intercourse of the old countries did not
correspond to their requirements. Thus they begin with the most
advanced individuals of the old countries, and, therefore, with the
correspondingly most advanced form of intercourse, even before
this form of intercourse has been able to establish itself in the old
countries. This is the case with all colonies, insofar as they are not
mere military or trading stations. Carthage, the Greek colonies, and
Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, provide examples of
this. A similar relationship issues from conquest, when a form of
intercourse which has evolved on another soil is brought over
complete to the conquered country; whereas in its home it was still
encumbered with interests and relations left over from earlier
periods, here it can and must be established completely and without
hindrance, if only to assure the conquerors’ lasting power. (England
and Naples after the Norman conquest,34 when they received the
most perfect form of feudal organisation.)

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

[8. THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE (CONQUEST) IN HISTORY]

This whole conception of history appears to be contradicted by
the fact of conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and
robbery, etc., have been accepted as the driving force of history.
Here we must limit ourselves to the chief points and take, therefore,
only the most striking example — the destruction of an old civilisation
by a barbarous people and the resulting formation of an entirely new
organisation of society. (Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and
Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks.)

163] With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as
indicated above,3 a regular form of intercourse, which is the more
eagerly exploited as the increase in population together with the
traditional and, for it, the only possible crude mode of production
gives rise to the need for new means of production. In Italy, on the
other hand, the concentration of landed property (caused not only
by buying-up and indebtedness but also by inheritance, since loose
living being rife and marriage rare, the old families gradually died
out and their possessions fell into the hands of a few) and its
conversion into grazing-land (caused not only by the usual economic
factors still operative today but by the importation of plundered and
tribute corn and the resultant lack of demand for Italian corn)
brought about the almost total disappearance of the free population;
the slaves died out again and again, and had constantly to be
replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the entire
production process. The plebeians, midway between freemen and
slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble.
Rome indeed never became more than a city; its connection with the
provinces was almost exclusively political and could, therefore, easily
be broken again by political events.

Nothing is more common than the notion that in history up till
now it has only been a question of taking. The barbarians take the
Roman Empire, and this fact of taking is made to explain the
transition from the old world to the feudal system. In this taking by
barbarians, however, the question is whether the nation which is
conquered has evolved industrial productive forces, as is the case
with modern peoples, or whether its productive forces are based for

3 Probably a reference to one of the missing pages of the manuscript (see this
volume, p. 63). A similar idea is expressed in the clean copy; see this volume,
p. 34.— Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

the most part merely on their concentration and on the community.
Taking is further determined by the object taken. A banker’s
fortune, consisting of paper, cannot be taken at all without the
taker’s submitting to the conditions of production and intercourse of
the country taken. Similarly the total industrial capital of a modern
industrial country. And finally, everywhere there is very soon an end
to taking, and when there is nothing more to take, you have to set
about producing. From this necessity of producing, which very soon
asserts itself, it follows J64| that the form of community adopted by
the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of development
of the productive forces they find in existence; or, if this is not the
case from the start, it must change according to the productive
forces. This, too, explains the fact, which people profess to have
noticed everywhere in the period following the migration of the
peoples, namely that the servant was master, and that the conquerors
very soon took over language, culture and manners from the
conquered.

The feudal system was by no means brought complete from
Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were
concerned, in the martial organisation of the army during the actual
conquest, and this evolved only after the conquest into the feudal
system proper through the action of the productive forces found in
the conquered countries. To what an extent this form was
determined by the productive forces is shown by the abortive
attempts to realise other forms derived from reminiscences of
ancient Rome (Charlemagne, etc.).

To be continued. —

[9. CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
AND THE FORM OF INTERCOURSE UNDER THE CONDITIONS
OF LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY AND FREE COMPETITION.

CONTRADICTION BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL]

In large-scale industry and competition the whole mass of
conditions of existence, limitations, biases of individuals, are fused
together into the two simplest forms: private property and labour.
With money every form of intercourse, and intercourse itself,
becomes fortuitous for the individuals. Thus money implies that all
intercourse up till now was only intercourse of individuals under
particular conditions, not of individuals as individuals. These
conditions are reduced to two: accumulated labour or private

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

property, and actual labour. If both or one of these ceases, then
intercourse comes to a standstill. The modern economists themselves,
e.g., Sismondi, Cherbuliez, etc., oppose association des individus
to association des capitaux .a On the other hand, the individuals
themselves are entirely subordinated to the division of labour and
hence are brought into the most complete dependence on one
another. Private property, insofar as within labour it confronts labou r,
evolves out of the necessity of accumulation, and is in the beginning
still mainly a communal form, but in its further development it
approaches more and more the modern form of private property.
The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the
conditionsoi labour, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation
of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the
fragmentation between capital and labour, and the different forms of
property itself. The more the division of labour develops [65] and
accumulation grows, the further fragmentation develops. Labour
itself can only exist on the premise of this fragmentation.

(Personal energy of the individuals of various nations — Germans
and Americans — energy even as a result of miscegenation — hence
the cretinism of the Germans; in France, England, etc,, foreign
peoples transplanted to an already developed soil, in America to an
entirely new soil; in Germany the indigenous population quietly
stayed where it was.)

Thus two facts are here revealed.* First the productive forces
appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced
from the individuals, alongside the individuals; the reason for this is
that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in
opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are
only real forces in the intercourse and association of these
individuals. Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive
forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for
the individuals themselves no longer the forces of the individuals but
of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they
are owners of private property. Never, in any earlier period, have
the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the

* [Marginal note by Engels:] Sismondi.

Antoine Elvisee Cherbuliez, Riche ou Pauvre. — Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

intercourse of individuals as individuals, because their intercourse
itself was still a restricted one. On the other hand, standing against
these productive forces, we have the majority of the individuals from
whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus of
all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, who are,
however, by this verv fact put into a position to enter into relation
with one another as individuals.

Labour, the only connection which still links them with the
productive forces and with their own existence, has lost all semblance
of self-activity and only sustains their 1 66 1 life by stunting it. While in
the earlier periods self-activity and the production of material life
were separated since they devolved on different persons, and while,
on account of the narrowness of the individuals themselves, the
production of material life was considered a subordinate mode of
self-activity, they now diverge to such an extent that material life
appears as the end, and what produces this material life, labour
(which is now the only possible but, as we see, negative form of
self-activity), as the means.

1 10. THE NECESSITY, PRECONDITIONS AND CONSEQUENCES
OF THE ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY]

Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals
must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only
to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very
existence.

This appropriation is first determined by the object to be
appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a
totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. Even
from this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a
universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the
intercourse. The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more
than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to
the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a
totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the
development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.

This appropriation is further determined by the persons appro-
priating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are complete-
ly shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a com-
plete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the ap-
propriation of a totality of productive forces and in the development
of a totality of capacities entailed by this. All earlier revolutionary

5 — 2086

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self -activity was
restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited
intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument |67| of production,
and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their
instrument of production became their property, but they them-
selves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own
instrument of production. In all appropriations up to now, a mass of
individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of produc-
tion; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments
of production must be made subject to each individual, and property
to all. Modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by
individuals, unless it is controlled by all.

This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which
it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by
the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal
one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power
of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social
organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops
the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are
required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat
moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its
previous position in society.

Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life,
which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete
individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The
transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the
transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the
intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the
total productive forces by the united individuals, private property
comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition
always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and
each person’s particular way of gaining his livelihood have them-
selves become accidental.

The individuals, who are no longer 1 68 1 subject to the division of
labour, have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under
the name “man”, and the whole process which we have outlined has
been regarded by them as the evolutionary process of “man”, so that
at every historical stage “man” was substituted for the individuals
existing hitherto and shown as the motive force of history. The
whole process was thus conceived as a process of the self-estrange-
ment [ Selbstentfremdungsprozess ] of “man”,* and this was essentially

[Marginal note by Marx:] Self-estrangement.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was al-
ways foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later
age on to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which
from the first disregards the actual conditions, it was possible to
transform the whole of history into an evolutionary process of con-
sciousness.

* * *

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individu-
als within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It
embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage
and, insofar, transcends the state and the nation, though, on the
other hand again, it must assert itself in its external relations as
nationality and internally must organise itself as state. The term
“civil society” 35 emerged in the eighteenth century, when property
relations had already extricated themselves from the ancient and
medieval community. Civil society as such only develops with the
bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of produc-
tion and intercourse, which in all ages forms the basis of the state and
of the rest of the idealistic3 superstructure, has, however, always been
designated by the same name.

[11.] THE RELATION OF STATE AND LAW TO PROPERTY

The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle
Ages, is tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war,
with the [69] Germans by the rearing of cattle. In the case of the
ancient peoples, since several tribes live together in one city,
tribal property appears as state property, and the right of the
individual to it as mere “possession” which, however, like tribal
property as a whole, is confined to landed property only. Real
private property began with the ancients, as with modern nations,
with movable property. (Slavery and community) ( dominium ex jure
Quiriturnh). — In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle
Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages — feudal landed
property, corporative movable property, capital invested in man-
ufacture— to modern capital, determined by large-scale industry
and universal competition, i.e., pure private property, which has cast

3 I. e., ideal, ideological. — Ed.

b Ownership in accordance with the law applying to full Roman citizens. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the state
from any influence on the development of property. To this modern
private property corresponds the modern state, which, purchased
gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen
entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence
has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the
owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the
rise and fall of government securities on the stock exchange. By the
mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie
is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and
to give a general form to its average interests. Through the
emancipation of private property from the community, the state has
become a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society; but it is
nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are
compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the
mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence
of the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the
estates have not vet completely developed into classes, where the
estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still play a part
and there exists a mixture, where consequently no section of the
population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case
particularly m Germany. The most perfect example of the modern
state is North 1 70 1 America. The modern French, English and
American writers all express the opinion that the state exists only for
the sake of private property, so that this view has also been generally
accepted by the average man.

Since the state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class
assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of
an epoch is epitomised, it follows that all common institutions are set
up with the help of the state and are given a political form. Hence the
illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced
from its real basis — on free will. Similarly, justice is in its turn reduced
to statute law.

Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the
disintegration of the natural community. With the Romans the
development of private property and civil law had no further
industrial and commercial consequences, because their whole mode
of production did not alter.* With modern peoples, where the feudal
community was disintegrated by industry and trade, there began
with the rise of private property and civil law a new phase, which was
capable of further development. The very first town which carried

* [?4arginal note by Engels:] (Usury!)

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

on an extensive maritime trade in the Middle Ages, Amalfi, also
developed maritime law.36 As soon as industry and trade developed
private property further, first in Italy and later in other countries,
the highly developed Roman civil law was immediately adopted
again and raised to authority. When later the bourgeoisie had
acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in
order to overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie,
there began in all countries — in France in the sixteenth century — the
real development of law, which in all 1 7 1 ] countries except England
proceeded on the basis of the Roman code of laws. In England, too,
Roman legal principles had to be introduced to further the develop-
ment of civil law (especially in the case of movable property). (It must
not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent history as
religion.)

In civil law the existing property relations are declared to be
the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi a itself asserts
on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely
independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that
private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary
disposal of the thing. In practice, the abuti has very definite
economic limitations for the owner of private property, if he does
not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi pass into other
hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with reference to
his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true property,
in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which
the philosophers call an idea*). This juridical illusion, which reduces
law to the mere will, necessarily leads, in the further development of
property relations, to the position that a man may have a legal
title to a thing without really having the thing. If, for instance, the
income from a piece of land disappears owing to competition, then
the proprietor has certainly his legal title to it along with the jus utendi
et abutendi. But he can do nothing with it: he owns nothing as a
landed proprietor if he has not enough capital elsewhere to cultivate
his land. This illusion of the jurists also explains the fact that for
them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that individuals
enter into relations among themselves (e.g., contracts); it explains why
they consider that these relations [can] be entered into or not at will,

* [Marginal note by Marx:] For the philosophers relationship —idea. They only know
the relation of “Man” to himself and hence for them all real relations become ideas.

The right of use and of disposal. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

1 72 1 and that their content [rests] purely on the individual free will of
the contracting parties.

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce,
new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g., insurance
companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them
among the modes of acquiring property.3

[12. FORMS OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS]

The influence of the division of labour on science.

The role of repression with regard to the state, law, morality, etc.

It is precisely because the bourgeoisie rules as a class that in the law
it must give itself a general expression.

Natural science and history.

There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion,
etc.*

Why the ideologists turn everything upside-down.

Clerics, jurists, politicians.

Jurists, politicians (statesmen in general), moralists, clerics.

For this ideological subdivision within a class: 1) The occupation
assumes an independent existence owing to division of labour. Everyone
believes his craft to be the true one. Illusions regarding the
connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be
cherished by them because of the very nature of the craft. In
consciousness — in jurisprudence, politics, etc. — relations become
concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of
the relations also become fixed concepts in their mind. The judge, for
example, applies the code, he therefore regards legislation as the
real, active driving force. Respect for their goods, because their craft
deals with general matters. ’

Idea of law. Idea of state. The matter is turned upside-down in
ordinary consciousness.

* [Marginal note by Marx:] To the “community” as it appears in the ancient state,
in feudalism and in the absolute monarchy, to this bond correspond especially the
religious conceptions.

3 The following notes, written by Marx, were intended for further elabora-
tion.— Ed.

The German Ideology. I. Feuerbach

Religion is from the outset consciousness of the transcendental arising
from actually existing forces.

This more popularly.

Tradition, with regard to law, religion, etc.

* * *

[73]a Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from
themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life-process.
How does it happen that their relations assume an independent
existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life
become superior to them?

In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the
development of the productive power at any particular time.

Landed property. Communal property. Feudal. Modern.
Estate property. Manufacturing property. Industrial capital.

a This, the last, page is not numbered in the manuscript. It contains notes relating
to the beginning of the authors’ exposition of the materialist conception of history.
The ideas outlined here are set forth in the clean copy, Section 3 (see this volume,
pp. 32-35). — Ed.

THE LEIPZIG COUNCIL37

In the third volume of the Wigand’sche Vierteljahrsschrift for 1845
the battle of the Huns, prophetically portrayed by Kaulbach,38
actually takes place. The spirits of the slain, whose fury is not
appeased even in death, raise a hue and cry, which sounds like the
thunder of battles and war-cries, the clatter of swords, shields and
iron waggons. But it is not a battle over earthly things. The holy war
is being waged not over protective tariffs, the constitution, potato
blight,39 banking affairs and railways, but in the name of the most
sacred interests of the spirit, in the name of “substance”, “self-
consciousness”, “criticism”, the “unique” and the “true man”. We are
attending a council of church fathers. As these church fathers are
the last specimens of their kind, and as here, it is to be hoped, the
cause of the Most High, alias the Absolute, is being pleaded for the
last time, it is worth while taking a verbatim report of the proceed-
ings.

Here, first of all, is Saint Bruno, who is easily recognised by his stick
(“become sensuousness, become a stick ”, Wigand, p. 130).a His head
is crowned with a halo of “pure criticism” and, full of contempt for the
world, he wraps himself in his “self-consciousness”. He has
“ smashed religion in its entirety and the state in its manifestations”
(p. 138), by violating the concept of “substance” in the name of the
most high self-consciousness. The ruins of the church and “debris”
of the state lie at his feet, while his glance “strikes down” the “mass-
es” into the dust. He is like God, he has neither father nor mother,
he is “his own creation, his own product” (p. 136). In short, he is the
“Napoleon” of the spirit, in spirit he is “Napoleon”. His spiritual
exercises consist in constantly “examining himself, and in this
self-examination he finds the impulse to self-determination”

Bruno Bauer, “Charakterisrik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council

(p. 1 36); as a result of such wearisome self-recording he has obviously
become emaciated. Besides “examining” himself — from time to time
he “examines” also, as we shall see, the Westphalische Dampfboot .a

Opposite him stands Saint Max, whose services to the Kingdom of
God consist in asserting that he has established and proved — on
approximately 600 printed pagesb — his identity, that he is not just
anyone, not some “Tom, Dick or Harry”, but precisely Saint Max
and no other. About his halo and other marks of distinction only one
thing can be said: that they are “his object and thereby his property”,
that they are “unique” and “incomparable” and that they are
“inexpressible” (p. 148).c He is simultaneously the “phrase” and the
“owner of the phrase”, simultaneously Sancho Panza and Don
Quixote. His ascetic exercises consist of sour thoughts about
thoughtlessness, of considerations throughout many pages about
inconsiderateness and of the sanctification of unholiness. Incidental-
ly, there is no need for us to elaborate on his virtues, for concerning
all the qualities ascribed to him — even if there were more of them
than the names of God among the Muslims — he is in the habit of
saying: I am all this and something more, I am the all of this nothing
and the nothing of this all. He is favourably distinguished from his
gloomy rival in possessing a certain solemn “ light-heartedness ” and
from time to time he interrupts his serious ponderings with a “critical
hurrah ”.

These two grand masters of the Holy Inquisition summon the
heretic Feuerbach, who has to defend himself against the grave
charge of gnosticism. The heretic Feuerbach, “thunders” Saint
Bruno, is in possession of hyle,d substance, and refuses to hand it over
lest my infinite self-consciousness be reflected in it. Self-conscious-
ness has to wander like a ghost until it has taken back into itself all
things which arise from it and flow into it. It has already swallowed
the whole world, except for this hyle, substance, which the gnostic
Feuerbach keeps under lock and key and refuses to hand over.

Saint Max accuses the gnostic of doubting the dogma revealed by
the mouth of Saint Max himself, the dogma that “every goose, every
dog, every horse” is “the perfect, or, if one prefers the superlative
degree, the most perfect, man”. ( Wigand , p. 187: “The aforesaid
does not lack a tittle of what makes man a man. Indeed, the same
applies also to every goose, every dog, every horse.”)

a See this volume, pp. 112-13. — Ed.
b Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenlhum. — Ed.
c See Max Stirner, “Recensenten Stirners”. — Ed.
d Matter, substance. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Besides the hearing of these important indictments, sentence is
also pronounced in the case brought by the two saints against Moses
Hess and in the case brought by Saint Bruno against the authors of
Die heilige Familie. But as these accused have been busying
themselves with “worldly affairs” and, therefore, have failed to
appear before the Santa Casa,40 they are sentenced in their absence
to eternal banishment from the realm of the spirit for the term of
their natural life.

Finally, the two grand masters are again starting some strange
intrigues among themselves and against each other.*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] On the plea that he is
an “unusually cunning and politic mind” ( Wigand, p. 192) Dottore Graziano, alias
Arnold Ruge, appears in the background. [This seems to indicate that originally a
chapter on Ruge was also planned (see Note 7).]

SAINT BRUNO

1. “CAMPAIGN” AGAINST FEUERBACH

Before turning to the solemn discussion which Bauer’s self-
consciousness has with itself and the world, we should reveal one
secret. Saint Bruno uttered the battle-cry and kindled the war only
because he had to “safeguard” himself and his stale, soured criticism
against the ungrateful forgetfulness of the public, only because he
had to show that, in the changed conditions of 1845, criticism always
remained itself and unchanged. He wrote the second volume of the
“good cause and his own cause”3: he stands his ground, he fights pro
arts et focis.b In the true theological manner, however, he conceals
this aim of his by an appearance of wishing to “characterise” Feuer-
bach. Poor Bruno was quite forgotten, as was best proved by the
polemic between Feuerbach and Stirner,c in which no notice at all
was taken of him. For just this reason he seized on this polemic in
order to be able to proclaim himself, as the antithesis of the antago-
nists, their higher unity, the Holy Spirit.

Saint Bruno opens his “campaign” with a burst of artillery fire
against Feuerbach, that is to say, with a revised and enlarged reprint
of an article which had already appeared in the Norddeutsche Blatter ,d
Feuerbach is made into a knight of “ substance ” in order that Bauer’s
“ self-consciousness ” shall stand out in stronger relief. In this tran-

a Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” is here ironically
called the second volume of Bauer’s book Die gute. Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene
Angelegenheit (The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Cause). — Ed.

b Literally: for altars and hearths, used in the sense of: for house and home — that
is, pleading his own cause. — Ed.

c Feuerbach, “Ueber das ‘Wesen des Christenthums’ in Beziehung auf den
‘Einzigen und sein Eigenthum’”. — Ed.

d I. e., Bruno Bauer’s article “Ludwig Feuerbach”. — Ed.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

substantiation of Feuerbach, which is supposed to be proved by
all the writings of the latter, our holy man jumps at once from
Feuerbach’s writings on Leibniz and Bayle3 to the Wesen des
Christenthums, leaving out the article against the “positive phi-
losophers”41 in the Hallische Jahrbucher.b This “oversight” is “in
place”. For there Feuerbach revealed the whole wisdom of “self-
consciousness” as against the positive representatives of “sub-
stance”, at a time when Saint Bruno was still indulging in specula-
tion on the immaculate conception.

It is hardly necessary to mention that Saint Bruno still continues to
prance about on his old-Hegelian war horse. Listen to the first
passage in his latest revelations from the Kingdom of God:

“Hegel combined into one Spinoza’s substance and Fichte’s ego; the unity of
both, the combination of these opposing spheres, etc., constitutes the peculiar interest
but, at the same time, the weakness of Hegel’s philosophy. [...] This contradiction in
which Hegel’s system was entangled had to be resolved and destroyed. But he could
only do this by making it impossible for all time to put the question: what is the
relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit.... This was possible in two ways. Either
self-consciousness had to be burned again in the flames of substance, i.e., the pure
substantiality relation had to be firmly established and maintained, or it had to be
shown that personality is the creator of its own attributes and essence, that it belongs to
the concept of personality in general to posit itself” (the “concept” or the
“personality”?) “as limited, and again to abolish this limitation which it posits by its
universal essence , for precisely this essence is only the result of its inner self-distinction, of its
activity” ( Wigand, pp. 86, 87, 88). c

In Die heilige Familie (p. 220)d Hegelian philosophy was
represented as a union of Spinoza and Fichte and at the same time the
contradiction involved in this was emphasised. The specific
peculiarity of Saint Bruno is that, unlike the authors of Die heilige
Familie, he does not regard the question of the relation of self-
consciousness to substance as “a point of controversy within
Hegelian speculation”, but as a world-historic, even an absolute
question. This is the sole form in which he is capable of expressing the
conflicts of the present day. He really believes that the triumph of self-
consciousness over substance has a most essential influence not only
on European equilibrium but also on the whole future development
of the Oregon problem. As to the extent to which the abolition of the
Corn Laws in England depends on it, very little has so far transpired ,42

a The reference is to the following works of Feuerbach: Geschichte der neuern
Philosophic. Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritih der Leibnitz’schen Philosophic and Pierre
Bayle. — Ed.

b Ludwig Feuerbach, “Zur Kritik der ‘positiven Philosophic’ ”. — Ed.
c Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 139. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

The abstract and nebulous expression into which a real collision is
distorted by Hegel is held by this “critical” mind to be the real
collision itself. Bruno accepts the speculative contradiction and
upholds one part of it against the other. A philosophical phrase about
a real question is for him the real question itself. Consequently, on
the one hand, instead of real people and their real consciousness of
their social relations, which apparently confront them as something
independent, he has the mere abstract expression: self-consciousness,
just as, instead of real production, he has the activity of this
self-consciousness, which has become independent. On the other hand,
instead of real nature and the actually existing social relations, he has
the philosophical summing-up of all the philosophical categories or
names of these relations in the expression: substance; for Bruno,
along with all philosophers and ideologists, erroneously regards
thoughts and ideas — the independent intellectual expression of the
existing world — as the basis of this existing world. It is obvious that
with these two abstractions, which have become senseless and empty,
he can perform all kinds of tricks without knowing anything at all
about real people and their relations. (See, in addition, what is
said about substance in connection with Feuerbach and concerning
“humane liberalism”3 and the “holy” in connection with Saint Max.)
Hence, he does not forsake the speculative basis in order to solve the
contradictions of speculation; he manoeuvres while remaining on
that basis, and he himself still stands so much on the specifically
Hegelian basis that the relation of “self-consciousness” to the
“absolute spirit” still gives him no peace. In short, we are confronted
with the philosophy of self-consciousness th at was announced in the Kritik
der Synoptiker , carried out in Das entdeckte Chrislenthum and which,
unfortunately, was long ago anticipated in Hegel’s Phdnornenologie.
This new philosophy of Bauer’s was completely disposed of in Die
heilige Familie on page 220 et seq. and on pages 304-0 7.b Here,
however, Saint Bruno even contrives to caricature himself by
smuggling in “personality”, in order to be able, with Stirner, to
portray the single individual as “his own product”, and Stirner as
Bruno's product. This step forward deserves a brief notice.

First of all, let the reader compare this caricature with the original,
the explanation given of self-consciousness in Das entdeckte Christen-
thum, page 113, and then let him compare this explanation with its
prototype, with Hegel’s Phdnornenologie, pages 575, 583 and so on.
(Both these passages are reproduced in Die heilige Familie, pages

3 See this volume, pp. 40, 54, 232-39, 282-301. — Ed.
b See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 139 et seq. and 191-93. — Ed.

100

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

221, 223, 224.a) But now let us turn to the caricature! “Personality in
general”! “Concept”! “Universal essence”! “To posit itself as limited
and again to abolish the limitation”! “Inner self-distinction”! What
tremendous “results”! “Personality in general” is either nonsense
“in general” or the abstract concept of personality. Therefore, it is
part of the “concept” of the concept of personality to “posit itself as
limited”. This limitation, which belongs to the “concept” of its
concept, personality directly afterwards posits “by its universal
essence”. And after it has again abolished this limitation, it turns out
that “precisely this essence” is “the result of its inner self-distinction”.
The entire grandiose result of this intricate tautology amounts,
therefore, to Hegel’s familiar trick of the self-distinction of man in
thought, a self-distinction which the unfortunate Bruno stubbornly
proclaims to be the sole activity of “personality in general”. A fairly
long time ago it was pointed out to Saint Bruno that there is nothing
to be got from a “personality” whose activity is restricted to these, by
now trivial, logical leaps. At the same time the passage quoted
contains the naive admission that the essence of Bauer’s “personali-
ty” is the concept of a concept, the abstraction of an abstraction.

Bruno’s criticism of Feuerbach, insofar as it is new, is restricted to
hypocritically representing Stirner’s reproaches against Feuerbach
and Bauer as Bauer’s reproaches against Feuerbach. Thus, for
example, the assertions that the “essence of man is essence in general
and something holy”, that “man is the God of man”, that the
human species is “the Absolute1’, that Feuerbach splits man “into an
essential and an inessential ego” (although Bruno always declares
that the abstract is the essential and, in his antithesis of criticism and
the mass, conceives this split as far more monstrous than Feuerbach
does), that a struggle must be waged against the “predicates of
God”, etc. On the question of selfish and selfless love, Bruno,
polemising with Feuerbach, copies Stirner almost word for word for
three pages (pp. 133-35) just as he very clumsily copies Stirner’s
phrases: “every man is his own creation”, “truth is a ghost”, and so
on. In addition, in Bruno the “creation” is transformed into a
“product”. We shall return to this exploitation of Stirner by Saint
Bruno.

Thus, the first thing that we discovered in Saint Bruno was his
continual dependence on Hegel. We shall not, of course, dwell
further on the remarks he has copied from Hegel, but shall only put
together a few more passages which show how firmly he believes in
the power of the philosophers and how he shares their illusion that a

a See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 139-41. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

101

modified consciousness, a new turn given to the interpretation of
existing relations, could overturn the whole hitherto existing world.
Imbued with this faith, Saint Bruno also has one of his pupils
certify — in issue IV of Wigand’s quarterly, p. 327 — that his phrases
on personality given above, which were proclaimed by him in
issue III, were “world-shattering ideas”.3

Saint Bruno says ( Wigand, p. 95) b:

“Philosophy has never been anything but theology reduced to its most general
form and given its most rational expression.”

This passage, aimed against Feuerbach, is copied almost word for
word from Feuerbach’s Philosophie der Zukunft (p. 2):

“Speculative philosophy is true, consistent, rational theology.”

Bruno continues:

“Philosophy, in alliance with religion, has always striven for the absolute
dependence of the individual and has actually achieved this by demanding and causing
the absorption of the individual life in universal life, of the accident in substance, of
man in the absolute spirit.”

As if Bruno’s “philosophy”, “in alliance with” Hegel’s, and his still
continuing forbidden association with theology, did not “demand”,
if not “cause”, the “absorption of man” in the idea of one of his
“accidents”, that of self-consciousness, as “substance”! Moreover,
one sees from this whole passage with what joy the church father
with his “pulpit eloquence” continues to proclaim his “world-
shattering” faith in the mysterious power of the holy theologians
and philosophers. Of course, in the interests of the “good cause of
freedom and his own cause”. c

On page 105 our godfearing man has the insolence to reproach
Feuerbach:

“Feuerbach made of the individual, of the depersonalised man of Christianity, not
a man, not a true” (!) “real” (!!) “personal” (!!!) “man” (these predicates owe their
origin to Die heilige Familie and Stirner), “but an emasculated man, a slave” —

and thereby utters, inter alia, the nonsense that he, Saint Bruno, can
make people by means of the mind.

Further on in the same passage he says:

“According to Feuerbach the individual has to subordinate himself to the species,
serve it. The species of which Feuerbach speaks is Hegel’s Absolute, and it, too, exists
nowhere.”

a “Ueber das Recht des Freigesprochenen...”. — Ed.
b Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

c An ironical allusion to Bauer’s book Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene
A ngelegenheit. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Here, as in all the other passages, Saint Bruno does not deprive
himself of the glory of making the actual relations of individuals
dependent on the philosophical interpretation of these relations. He
has not the slightest inkling of the correlation which exists between
the concepts of Hegel’s “absolute spirit” and Feuerbach’s “species”
on the one hand and the existing world on the other.

On page 104 the holy father is mightily shocked by the heresy with
which Feuerbach transforms the holy trinity of reason, love and will
into something that “is in individuals and over individuals”, as
though, in our day, every inclination, every impulse, every need did
not assert itself as a force “in the individual and over the individual”,
whenever circumstances hinder their satisfaction. If the holy father
Bruno experiences hunger, for example, without the means of
appeasing it, then even his stomach will become a force “in him and
over him”. Feuerbach’s mistake is not that he stated this fact but that
in idealistic fashion he endowed it with independence instead of
regarding it as the product of a definite and surmountable stage of
historical development.

Page 111: “Feuerbach is a slave and his servile nature does not allow him to fulfil
the work of a man , to recognise the essence of religion” (what a fine “work of a
man”!).... “He does not perceive the essence of religion because he does not know the
biidge over which he can make his way to the source of religion.”

Saint Bruno still seriously believes that religion has its own “es-
sence”. As for the “bridge”, “ over which ” one makes one’s way to the
“ source of religion”, this asses’ bridge3 must certainly be an aqueduct.
At the same time Saint Bruno establishes himself as a curiously
modernised Charon who has been retired owing to the building of
the bridge, becoming a tollkeeperb who demands a halfpenny13 from
every person crossing the bridge to the spectral realm of religion.

On page 120 the saint remarks:

“How could Feuerbach exist if there were no truth and truth were onlv a spectre’’
(Stirner, help!1) “of which hitherto man has been afraid?”

The “man” who fears the “spectre” of “truth” is no other than the
worthy Bruno himself. Ten pages earlier, on p. 1 10, he had already
let out the following world-shattering cry of terror at the sight of the
“spectre” of truth:

a A pun in the original: Eselsbriicke (asses’ bridge) — an expedient used by dull
or lazy people to understand a difficult problem. — Ed.

This word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.
c A paraphrase of the expression “Samuel, hilf!” (Samuel, help!) from Carl Maria
von Weber’s opera Der Freischutz (libretto by Friedrich Kind), Act II, Scene 6. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

103

‘‘Truth which is never of itself encountered as a ready-made object and which
develops itself and reaches unity only in the unfolding of personality.”

Thus, we have here not only truth, this spectre, transformed into a
person which develops itself and reaches unity, but in addition this
trick is accomplished in a third personality outside it, after the
manner of the tapeworm. Concerning the holy man’s former love
affair with truth, when he was still young and the lusts of the flesh
still strong in him — see Die heilige Familie, p. 115 et seq.a

How purified of all fleshly lusts and earthly desires our holy man
now appears is shown by his vehement polemic against Feuerbach’s
sensuousness. Bruno by no means attacks the highly restricted way in
which Feuerbach recognises sensuousness. He regards Feuerbach’s
unsuccessful attempt, since it is an attempt to escape ideology, as — a
sin. Of course! Sensuousness is lust of the eye, lust of the flesh and
arroganceb — horror and abominationc in the eyes of the Lord! Do
you not know that to be fleshlv minded is death, but to be spiritually
minded is life and peace; for to be fleshly minded is hostility to
criticism, and everything of the flesh is of this world. And do you
not know that it is written: the works of the flesh are manifest, they
are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, obscenity, idolatry, witch-
craft, enmity, strife, envy, anger, quarrelsomeness, discord, sinful
gangs, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony and the like.d I pro-
phesy to you, as I prophesied before, that those who do such works
will not inherit the kingdom of criticism; but woe to them for in their
thirst for delights they are following the path of Cain and are falling
into the error of Balaam, and will perish in a rebellion, like that of
Korah. These lewd ones feast shamelessly on your alms, and fatten
themselves. They are clouds without water driven by the wind; bare,
barren trees, twice dead and uprooted; wild ocean waves frothing
their own shame; errant stars condemned to the gloom of darkness
for ever.4 For we have read that in the last days there will be terrible
times, people will appear who think much of themselves, lewd vilifiers
who love voluptuousness f more than criticism, makers of sinful
gangs, in short, slaves of the flesh. Such people are shunned by Saint
Bruno, who is spiritually minded and loathes the stained covering of
the flesh g and for this reason he condemns Feuerbach, whom he re-

a See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 79 et seq. — Ed.
b Cf. 1 John 2 : 16.— Ed.
c Cf. Ezekiel 11 : 18.— Ed.
d Cf. Galatians 5:19-21. — Ed.
e Cf. Jude 11-13.— Ed.
f Cf. 2 Timothy 3 : 1-4.— Ed.

B Cf. Jude 23.— Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

gards as the Korah of the gang, to remain outside together with the
dogs, the magicians, the debauched and the assassins.3 “Sensuous-
ness”— ugh! Not only does it throw the saintly church father into the
most violent convulsions, but it even makes him sing, and on page
121 he chants the “song of the end and the end of the song”. Sensu-
ousness— do you know, unfortunate one, what sensuousness is? Sen-
suousness is — a “stick” (p. 130). Seized with convulsions, Saint Bruno
even wrestles on one occasion with one of his own theses, just as Jacob
of blessed memory wrestled with God, with the one difference that
God twisted Jacob’s thigh, while our saintly epileptic twists all the
limbs and ties of his own thesis, and so, by a number of striking
examples, makes clear the identity of subject and object:

“Feuerbach may say what he likes ... all the same he destroys ” (!) “man... for he trans-
forms the word man into a mere phrase ... for he does not wholly make” (!) “ and create ” (!)
“man, but raises the whole of mankind to the Absolute, for in addition he declares not
mankind, but rather the senses to be the organ of the Absolute, and stamps the sensu-
ous— the object of the senses, of perception, of sensation — as the Absolute, the indu-
bitable and the immediately certain. Whereby Feuerbach — such is Saint Bruno’s
opinion — “can undoubtedly shake layers of the air, but he cannot smash the phenomena
of human essence, because his innermost” (!) “essence and his vitalising spirit [...]
already destroys the external” (!) “sound and makes it empty and jarring” (p. 121).

Saint Bruno himself gives us mysterious but decisive disclosures
about the causes of his nonsensical attitude:

“As though my ego does not also possess just this particular sex, un ique, compared
with all others, and these particular, unique sex organs.” (Besides his “unique sex or-
gans”, this noble-minded man also possesses a special “unique sex”!)

This unique sex is explained on page 121 in the sense that:

“sensuousness, like a vampire, sucks all the marrow and blood from the lifeoi man; it
is the insurmountable barrier against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow”.

But even the saintliest man is not pure! They are all sinners and
lack the glory that they should have before “self-consciousness”.
Saint Bruno, who in his lonely cell at midnight struggles with
“substance”, has his attention drawn by the frivolous writings of the
heretic Feuerbach to women and female beauty. Suddenly his sight
becomes less keen; his pure self-consciousness is besmirched, and a
reprehensible, sensuous fantasy plays about the frightened critic
with lascivious images. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.b
Bruno stumbles, he falls, he forgets that he is the power that “with its
strength binds, frees and dominates the world ”,c he forgets that
these products of his imagination are “spirit of his spirit”, he loses all

a Cf. Revelation 22:15.— Ed.
b Cf. Matthew 26:41.— Ed.
c Cf. ibid. 16: 19. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

105

“self-control” and, intoxicated, stammers a dithyramb to female
beauty, to its “tenderness, softness, womanliness”, to the “full and
rounded limbs” and the “surging, undulating, seething, rushing and
hissing, wave-like structure of the body”3 of woman. Innocence,
however, always reveals itself — even where it sins. Who does not
know that a “ surging , undulating, wave-like structure of the body”
is something that no eye has ever seen, or ear heard? There-
fore— hush, sweet soul, the spirit will soon prevail over the rebellious
flesh and set an insurmountable “barrier” to the overflowing,
seething lusts, “against which” they will soon deal themselves a
“mortal blow”.

“Feuerbach” — the saint finally arrives at this through a critical understanding of
Die heilige Familie — “is a materialist tempered with and corrupted by humanism, i.e., a
materialist who is unable to endure the earth and its being” (Saint Bruno knows the
being of the earth as distinct from the earth itself, and knows how one should behave
in order to “ endure the being of the earth”!) “but wants to spiritualise himself and rise
into heaven; and at the same time he is a humanist who cannot think and build a
spiritual world, but one who is impregnated with materialism”, and so on (p. 123).

Just as for Saint Bruno humanism, according to this, consists in
“thinking” and in “building a spiritual world”, so materialism
consists in the following:

“The materialist recognises only the existing, actual being, matter" (as though man
with all his attributes, including thought, were not an ‘‘existing, actual being"), “and
recognises it as actively extending and realising itself in multiplicity, nature" (p. 123).

First, matter is an existing, actual being, but only in itself,
concealed; only when it “actively extends and realises itself in mul-
tiplicity” (an “existing, actual being” “realises itself”!!), only then does
it become nature. First there exists the concept of matter, an abstrac-
tion, an idea, and this latter realises itself in actual nature. Word
for word the Hegelian theory of the pre-existence of the creative
categories. From this point of view it is understandable that Saint
Bruno mistakes the philosophical phrases of the materialists con-
cerning matter for the actual kernel and content of their world out-

Io°k‘ 2. SAINT BRUNO’S VIEWS ON THE STRUGGLE

BETWEEN FEUERBACH AND STIRNER

Having thus admonished Feuerbach with a few weighty words,
Saint Bruno takes a look at the struggle between Feuerbach and the
unique. The first evidence of his interest in this struggle is a
methodical, triple smile.

a Marx and Engels have inserted the words “seething, rushing and hissing” —
which occur in Schiller’s poem Der Taucher (“The Diver”) — into the passage they
quote from Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“The critic pursues his path irresistibly, confident of victory, and victorious. He is
slandered — he smiles. He is called a heretic — he smiles. The old world starts a crusade
against him — he smiles.”

Saint Bruno — this is thus established — -pursues his path but he
does not pursue it like other people, he follows a critical course, he
accomplishes this important action with a smile.

“He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map, with the
augmentation of the Indies. I know my lady will strike him: if she do, he’ll smile and
take’t for a great art”a — like Shakespeare’s Malvolio.

Saint Bruno himself does not lift a finger to refute his two
opponents, he knows a better way of ridding himself of them, he
leaves them — divide et impera — to their own quarrel. He confronts
Stirner with Feuerbach’s man (p. 124), and Feuerbach with Stirner’s
unique (p. 126 et seq.); he knows that they are as incensed against
each other as the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely
devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.43 And
Saint Bruno passes sentence on these tails, declaring that they are
“ substance ” and, consequently, condemned to eternal damnation.

In confronting Feuerbach with Stirner he repeats what Hegel said
of Spinoza and Fichte, where, as we know, the punctiform ego is
represented as one, and moreover the most stable, aspect of
substance. However much Bruno formerly raged against egoism,
which he even considered the odor specificus of the masses, on page
1 29 he accepts egoism from Stirner — only this should be “not that of
Max Stirner”, but, of course, that of Bruno Bauer. He brands
Stirner’s egoism as having the moral defect “that his ego for the
support of its egoism requites hypocrisy, deception, external
violence”. For the rest, he believes (see p. 124) in the critical miracles
of Saint Max and sees in the latter’s struggle (p. 126) “a real effort to
radically destroy substance”. Instead of dealing with Stirner’s
criticism of Bauer’s “pure criticism”, he asserts on p. 124 that
Stirner’s criticism could affect him just as little as any other, “beca-
use he himself is the critic” .

Finally Saint Bruno refutes both of them, Saint Max and
Feuerbach, applying almost literally to Feuerbach and Stirner the
antithesis drawn by Stirner between the critic Bruno Bauer and the
dogmatist.

Wigand, p. 1 38: “Feuerbach puts himself in opposition to, and thereby ” (!) “ stands in
opposition to, the unique. He is a communist and wants to be one. The unique is an egoist

d Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2. Marx and Engels quote these lines
from the German translation by August Wilhelm von Schlegel. But they have
substituted the word Kunst (art) for the word Gunst (favour). — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

107

and has to be one; he is the holy one, the other the profane one, he is the good one, the
other the evil one, he is God, the other is man. Both are dogmatists .”

The point is, therefore, that he accuses both of dogmatism.

Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, p. 194: “The critic is afraid of becoming dogmatic
or of putting forward dogmas. Obviously, he would then become the opposite of a
critic, a dogmatist; he who as a critic was good, would now become evil, or from being
unselfish ” (a Communist) “would become an egoist, etc. Not a single dogma! — that is his
dogma.”

3. SAINT BRUNO VERSUS THE AUTHORS
OF DIE HEILIGE FAMILIE

Saint Bruno, who has disposed of Feuerbach and Stirner in the
manner indicated and who has “cut the unique off from all
progress”, now turns against the apparent “consequences of
Feuerbach”, the German Communists and, especially, the authors of
Die heilige Familie. The expression “real humanism”, which he
found in the preface to this polemic treatise,3 provides the main basis
of his hypothesis. He will recall a passage from the Bible:

“And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal”
(in our case it was just the opposite), “even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with
milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it” (1 Corinthians,
3:1-2).

The first impression that Die heilige Familie made on the worthy
church father was one of profound distress and serious, respectable
sorrow. The one good side of the book is that it

“showed what Feuerbach had to become, and the position his philosophy can adopt, if
it desires to fight against criticism” (p. 138),

that, consequently, it combined in an easy-going way “desiring” with
“what can be” and “what must be”, but this good side does not out-
weigh its many distressing sides. Feuerbach’s philosophy, which
strangely enough is presupposed here,

“dare not and cannot understand the critic, dare not and cannot know and perceive criti-
cism in its development, dare not and cannot know that, in relation to all that is
transcendental, criticism is a constant struggle and victory, a continual destruction and
creation, the sole ” (!) “creative and productive principle. It dare not and cannot know
how the critic has worked, and still works, to posit and to make” (!) “the transcendental
forces, which up to now have suppressed mankind and not allowed it to breathe and
live, into what they really are, the spirit of the spirit, the innermost of the innermost, a
native thing” (!) “out of and in the native soil, products and creations of
self-consciousness. It dare not and cannot know that the critic and only the critic has
smashed religion in its entirety, and the state in its various manifestations, etc.”
(pp. 138, 139).

See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 7. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Is this not an exact copy of the ancient Jehovah, who runs after his
errant people who found greater delight in the cheerful pagan gods,
and cries out:

“Hear me, Israel, and close not your ear, Judah! Am I not the Lord your God, who
led you out of the land of Egypt into the land flowing with milk and honey, and
behold, from your earliest youth you have done evil in my sight and angered me with
the work of my hands and turned your back unto me and not your face towards me,
though I invariably tutored you; and you have brought abominations into my house
to defile it, and built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Himmon, which
I did not command, and it never entered my head that you should do such
abominations; and I have sent to you my servant Jeremiah, to whom I did address my
word, beginning with the thirteenth year of the reign of King Josiah, son of Amon,
unto this day — and for twenty-three years now he has been zealously preaching to
you, but ye have not harkened. Therefore says the Lord God: Who has ever
heard the like of the virgin of Israel doing such an abomination. For rain water does
not disappear so quickly as my people forgets me. O earth, earth, earth, hear the word
of the Lord!”3

Thus, in a lengthy speech on “to dare” and “to be able”, Saint
Bruno asserts that his communist opponents have misunderstood
him. The way in which he describes criticism in this recent speech,
the way in which he transforms the former forces that suppressed
“the life of mankind” into “transcendental forces”, and these
transcendental forces into the “spirit of the spirit”, and the way in
which he presents “criticism” as the sole branch of production
proves that the apparent misconception is nothing but a disagreeable
conception. We proved that Bauer’s criticism is beneath all criticism,
owing to which we have inevitably become dogmatists. He even in all
seriousness reproaches us for our insolent disbelief in his ancient
phrases. The whole mythology of independent concepts, with Zeus
the Thunderer — self-consciousness — at the head, is paraded here
once again to the “jingling of hackneyed phrases of a whole janissary
band of current categories”. (Liter atur-Zeitung, cf. Die heilige Familie,
p. 234b). First of all, of course, the myth of the creation of the world,
i.e., of the hard “ labour ” of the critic, which is “the sole creative and
productive principle, a constant struggle and victory, a continual de-
struction and creation”, “working” and “having worked”. Indeed,
the reverend father even reproaches Die heilige Familie for under-
standing “criticism” in the same way as he understands it himself in
the present rejoinder. After taking back “substance” “into the land
of its birth, self-consciousness, the criticising and” (since Die heilige

3 Cf. Jeremiah 2 : 6, 32 : 22, 30, 33-35, 25 : 3, 19 : 3, 18 : 13, 14, 22 : 29 .— Ed.
The passage from “Correspondenz aus der Provinz” published in the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung was quoted in The Holy Family (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 148). —
Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

109

Familie also) “the criticised man, and discarding it” (self-conscious-
ness here seems to take the place of an ideological lumber-room),
he continues:

“It” (the alleged philosophy of Feuerbach) “dare not know that criticism and the
critics, as long as they have existed” (!)“have guided and made history, that even their
opponents and all the movements and agitations of the present time are their creation,
that it is they alone who hold power in their hands, because strength is in their consciousness,
and because they derive power from themselves, from their deeds, from criticism, from
their opponents, from their creations: that only by the act of criticism is man freed,
and thereby men also, and man is created” (!) “and thereby mankind as well”.

Thus, criticism and the critics are first of all two wholly different
subjects, existing aqd operating apart from each other. The critic is a
subject different from criticism, and criticism is a subject different
from the critic. This personified criticism, criticism as a subject, is
precisely that “critical criticism” against which Die heilige Familie was
directed. “Criticism and the critics, as long as they have existed, have
guided and made history.” It is clear that they could not do so “as
long as they” did not “exist”, and it is equally clear that “as long as
they have existed” they “made history” in their own fashion. Finally,
Saint Bruno goes so far as to “dare and be able” to give us one of the
most profound explanations about the state-shattering power of
criticism, namely, that “criticism and the critics hold power in their
hands, because” (a fine “because”!) “ strength is in their consciousness” ,
and, secondly, that these great manufacturers of history “hold power
in their hands”, because they “derive power from themselves and
from criticism” (i.e., again from themselves) — whereby it is still,
unfortunately, not proven that it is possible to “derive” anything at
all from there, from “themselves”, from “criticism”. On the basis of
criticism’s own words, one should at least believe that it must be
difficult to “derive” from there anything more than the category of
“substance” “discarded” there. Finally, criticism also “derives” “from
criticism” “power” for a highly monstrous oracular dictum. For it
reveals to us a secret that was hidden3 from our fathers and unknown
to our grandfathers, the secret that “only by the act of criticism is
man created, and thereby mankind as well” — whereas, up to now,
criticism was erroneously regarded as an act of people who existed
prior to it owing to quite different acts. Hence it seems that Saint
Bruno himself came “into the world, from the world, and to the
world” through “criticism”, i.e., by generatio aequivoca.b All this is,
perhaps, merely another interpretation of the following passage

a Cf. Colossians 1 : 26. — Ed.

b Spontaneous generation. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

from the Book of Genesis: And Adam knew, i.e., criticised, Eve his
wife: and she conceived,3 etc.

Thus we see here the whole familiar critical criticism, which was
already sufficiently characterised in Die heilige Familie, confronting
us again with all its trickery as though nothing had happened. There
is no need to be surprised at this, for the saint himself complains, on
page 140, that Die heilige Familie “cuts criticism off from all
progress”. With the greatest indignation Saint Bruno reproaches the
authors of Die heilige Familie because, by means of a chemical
process, they evaporated Bauer’s criticism from its “fluid” state into a
“ crystalline ” state.

It follows that “institutions of mendicancy”, the “baptismal
certificate of adulthood”, the “regions of pathos and thunder-like
aspects”, the “Mussulman conceptual affliction” (Die heilige Familie,
pp. 2, 3, 4b according to the critical Literatur-Zeitung ) — all this is
nonsense only if it is understood in the “crystalline” manner. And
the twenty-eight historical howlers of which criticism was proved
guilty in its excursion on “Englische Tagesfragen”c — are they not
errors when looked at from the “fluid” point of view? Does criticism
insist that; from the fluid point of view, it prophesied a priori the
Nauwerck conflict44 — long after this had taken place before its
eyes — and did not construct it post festum?d Does it still insist that the
word marechal could mean “farrier” from the “crystalline” point of
view, but from the “fluid” point of view at any rate must mean
“marshal”? Or that although in the “crystalline” conception “ un fait
physique” may mean “a physical fact”, the true “fluid” translation
should be “a fact of physics”? Or that “la malveillance de nos bourgeois
juste-milieux” e in the “fluid” state still means “the carefreeness of our
good burghers”? Does it insist that, from the “fluid” point of view,
“a child that does not, in its turn, become a father or mother is
essentially a daughter ”? That someone can have the task “of
representing, as it were, the last tear of grief shed by the past”? That
the various concierges, lions, grisettes, marquises, scoundrels and
wooden doors in Paris in their “fluid” form are nothing but phases

3 Cf. Genesis 4 : I . — Ed.

The expressions quoted are from Carl Reichardt’s reviews, published in the
Allgerneine Literatur-Zeitung, of the following books: Karl Heinrich Briiggemann,
Preussens Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwicklung..., and Daniel Benda, Katechismus fur
ivahlberechtigte Burger in Preussen. They are also quoted in The Holy Family (see present
edition, Vol. 4, p. 10). — Ed.

c An article by Julius Faucher. — Ed.

d An allusion to the article by [E.j J[ungnitz] “Herr Nauwerk und die
philosophische Facultat” published in Allgerneine Literatur-Zeitung. — Ed.

e The ill will of our middle-of-the-road bourgeois. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

111

of the mystery “in whose concept in general it belongs to posit itself
as limited and again to abolish this limitation which is posited- by its
universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its
inner self-distinction, its activity”3? That critical criticism in the
“fluid” sense “pursues its path irresistibly, victorious and confident
of victory”, when in dealing with a question it first asserts that it has
revealed its “true and general significance” and then admits that it
“had neither the will nor the right to go beyond criticism”, and
finally admits that “it had still to take one step but that step was
impossible because — it was impossible” (Die heilige Familie, p. 184b)?
That from the “fluid” point of view “the future is still the work” of
criticism, although “fate may decide as it will”c? That from the fluid
point of view criticism achieved nothing superhuman when it “came
into contradiction with its true elements — a contradiction which had
already found its solution in these same elements ”d?

The authors of Die heilige Familie have indeed committed the
frivolity of conceiving these and hundreds of other statements as
statements expressing firm, “crystalline” nonsense — but the synoptic
gospels should be read in a “fluid” way, i.e., according to the sense of
their authors, and on no account in a “crystalline” way, i.e., accord-
ing to their actual nonsense, in order to arrive at true faith and to
admire the harmony of the critical household.

“Engels and Marx, therefore, know only the criticism of the Literatur-Zeitung” e

— a deliberate lie, proving how “fluidly” our saint has read a book
in which his latest works are depicted merely as the culmination of all
the “work he has done”. But the church father lacked the calm to
read in a crystalline way, for he fears his opponents as rivals who
contest his canonisation and “want to deprive him of his sanctity, in
order to make themselves sanctified”.

Let us, incidentally, note the fact that, according to Saint Bruno’s
present statement, his Literatur-Zeitung by no means aimed at
founding “social society” or at “representing, as it were, the last tear
of grief” shed by German ideology, nor did it aim at putting mind in
the sharpest opposition to the mass and developing critical criticism
in all its purity, but only — at “depicting the liberalism and radicalism
of 1 842 and their echoes in their half-heartedness and phrase-mon-
gering”, hence at combating the “echoes” of what has long disap-

a Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.
b See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 118. — Ed.
c B. Bauer, “Neueste Schriften fiber die Judenfrage”.— Ed.
d B. Bauer, “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” — Ed.
e Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

peared. Tant de bruit pour une omelette /a Incidentally, it is just here
that the conception of history peculiar to German theory is again
shown in its “purest” light. The year 1842 is held to be the period of
the greatest brilliance of German liberalism, because at that time
philosophy took part in politics. Liberalism vanishes for the critic
with the cessation of the Deutsche Jahrbiicher and the Rheinische Zei-
tung, the organs of liberal and radical theory. After that, apparently,
there remain only the “echoes” — whereas in actual fact only now,
when the German bourgeoisie feels a real need for political power,
a need produced by economic relations, and is striving to satisfy it,
has liberalism in Germany an actual existence and thereby the
chance of some success.

Saint Bruno’s profound distress over Die heilige Familie did not
allow him to criticise this work “out of himself, through himself and
with himself”. To be able to master his pain he had first to obtain the
work in a “fluid” form. He found this fluid form in a confused
review, teeming with misunderstandings, in the Westphalische
Dampfboot, May issue, pp. 206-14.b All his quotations are taken from
passages quoted in the Westphalische Dampfboot and he quotes
nothing that is not quoted there.

The language of the saintly critic is likewise determined by the
language of the Westphalian critic. In the first place, all the
statements from the Foreword which are quoted by the Westphalian
( Dampfboot , p. 206) are transferred to the Wigand’sche Viertel-
jahrsschrift (pp. 140, 141). This transference forms the chief part of
Bauer’s criticism, according to the old principle already recom-
mended by Hegel:

“To trust common sense and, moreover, in order to keep up with the times and
advance with philosophy, to read reviews of philosophical works, perhaps even their
prefaces and introductory paragraphs; for the latter give the general principles on
which everything turns, while the former give, along with the historical information,
also an appraisal which, because it is an appraisal, even goes beyond Lhat which is
appraised This beaten track can be followed in one’s dressing-gown; but the elevated
feeling of the eternal, the sacred, the infinite, pursues its path in the vestments of a
high priest, a path” which, as we have seen. Saint Bruno also knows how to “pursue”
while “striking down” (Hegel, Phanomenologie, p. 54).

The Westphalian critic, after giving a few quotations from the
- preface, continues:

“Thus the preface itself leads to the battlefield of the book”, etc. (p. 206).

a Much ado about an omelette! An exclamation which Jacques Vallee, Sieur des
Barreaux, is supposed to have made when a thunderstorm occurred while he was
eating an omelette on a fast-day. — Ed.
b See this volume, p. 15. — Ed.

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113

The saintly critic, having transferred these quotations into the
Wigand’sche Vierteljahrsschrift, makes a more subtle distinction and
says:

“Such is the terrain and the enemy which Engels and Marx have created for battle."

From the discussion of the critical proposition: “the worker
creates nothing”, the Westphalian critic gives only the summarising
conclusion.

The saintly critic actually believes that this is all that was said about
the proposition, copies out the Westphalian quotation on page 141
and rejoices at the discovery that only “assertions” have been put
forward in opposition to criticism.

Of the examination of the critical outpourings about love, the
Westphalian critic on page 209 first writes out the corpus delicti in part
and then a few disconnected sentences from the refutation, which he
desires to use as an authority for his nebulous, sickly-sweet
sentimentality.

On pages 141-42 the saintly critic copies him out word for word,
sentence by sentence, in the same order as his predecessor quotes.

The Westphalian critic exclaims over the corpse of Herr Julius
Faucher: “Such is the fate of the beautiful on earth!”3

The saintly critic cannot finish his “hard work” without ap-
propriating this exclamation to use irrelevantly on page 142.

The Westphalian critic on page 212 gives a would-be summary of
the arguments which are aimed against Saint Bruno himself in Die
heilige Familie.

The saintly critic cheerfully and literally copies out all this stuff
together with all the Westphalian exclamations. He has not the
slightest idea that nowhere in the whole of this polemic discourse does
anyone reproach him for “transforming the problem of political
emancipation into that of human emancipation”, for “wanting to kill
the Jews”, for “transforming the Jews into theologians”, for
“transforming Hegel into Herr Hinrichs”, etc. Credulously, the
saintly critic repeats the Westphalian critic’s allegation that in Die
heilige Familie Marx volunteers to provide some sort of little schola-
stic treatise “in reply to Bauer’s silly self-apotheosis” . Yet the words
“silly self-apotheosis”, which Saint Bruno gives as a quotation, are
nowhere to be found in the whole of Die heilige Familie, but they do
occur with the Westphalian critic. Nor is the little treatise offered as a
reply to the “self -apology” of criticism on pages 150-63 of Die heilige
Familie, but only in the following section on page 165,b in

a Schiller, Wallenstein's Tod, Act IV, Scene 12. — Ed.
b See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 99-106 and 107. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

connection with the world-historic question: “Why did Herr Bauer
have to engage in politics?”

Finally on page 143 Saint Bruno presents Marx as an “ amusing
comedian ”, here again following his Westphalian model, who
resolved the “world-historic drama of critical criticism”, on page
213, into a “most amusing comedy ”,

Thus one sees how the opponents of critical criticism “dare and
can” “know how the critic has worked, and still works”!

4. OBITUARY FOR “M. HESS”

“What Engels and Marx could not yet do, M. Hess has accomplished.”

Such is the great, divine transition which — owing to the relative
“can” and “cannot” be done of the evangelists — has taken so firm a
hold of the holy man’s fingers that it has to find a place, relevantly or
irrelevantly, in every article of the church father.

“What Engels and Marx could not yet do, M. Hess has
accomplished.” But what is this “what” that “Engels and Marx could
not yet do”? Nothing more nor less, indeed, than — to criticise
Stirner. And why was it that Engels and Marx “could not yet” criticise
Stirner? For the sufficient reason that — Stirner’s book had not yet
appeared when they wrote Die heilige Familie.

This speculative trick — of joining together everything and bring-
ing the most diverse things into an apparent causal relation — has
truly taken possession not only of the head of our saint but also of his
fingers. With him it has become devoid of any contents and
degenerates into a burlesque manner of uttering tautologies with an
important mien. For example, already in the Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung (I, 5) we read:

“The difference between my work and the pages which, for example, a Philippson
covers with writing” (that is, the empty pages on which, “for example, a Philippson”
writes) “must, therefore, be so constituted as in fact it is” ! ! ! a

“M. Hess”, for whose writings Engels and Marx take absolutely no
responsibility, seems such a strange phenomenon to the saintly critic
that he is only capable of copying long excerpts from Die letzten
Philosophen and passing the judgment that “on some points this
criticism has not understood Feuerbach or also” (O theology!) “the
vessel wishes to rebel against the potter”. Cf. Epistle to the Romans,
9 : 20-21. Having once more performed the “hard work” of quoting,
our saintly critic finally arrives at the conclusion that Hess copies

a B. Bauer, “Neueste Schriften fiber die Judenfrage”. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno

115

from Hegel, since he uses the two words “united” and “develop-
ment”. Saint Bruno, of course, had in a round-about way to try to
turn against Feuerbach the proof given in Die heilige Familie of his
own complete dependence on Hegel.

“See, that is how Bauer had to end! He fought as best he could
against all the Hegelian categories”, with the exception of self-
consciousness — particularly in the glorious struggle of the Literatur-
Zeitung against Herr Hinrichs. How he fought and conquered them
we have already seen. For good measure, let us quote Wigand,
page 110, where he asserts that

the “true” (1) “ solution ” (2) “of contradictions ” (3) “in nature and history” (4), the
“ true unity ” (5) “of separate relations” (6), the “genuine” (7) “basis” (8) “and abyss”
(9) “of religion, the truly infinite ” (10), “irresistible, self-creative” (11) “personality”
(12) “has not yet been found”.

These three lines contain not two doubtful Hegelian categories,
as in the case of Hess, but a round dozen of “true, infinite,
irresistible” Hegelian categories which reveal themselves as such by
“the true unity of separate relations” — “see, that is how Bauer had to
end”! And if the holy man thinks that in Hess he has discovered a
Christian believer, not because Hess “hopes” — as Bruno says — but
because he does not hope and because he talks of the “resurrection”,
then our great church father enables us, on the basis of this same
page 110, to demonstrate his very pronounced Judaism. He declares
there

“that the true, living man in the flesh has not yet been bom”!!! (a new elucidation about
the determination of the “unique sex”) “and the mongrel produced” (Bruno Bauer?!?)
“is not yet able to master all dogmatic formulas” , etc.

That is to say, the Messiah is not yet born, the son of man has
first to come into the world and this world, being the world of the
Old Testament, is still under the rod of the law, of “dogmatic
formulas”.

Just as Saint Bruno, as shown above, made use of “Engels and
Marx” for a transition to Hess, so now the latter serves him to bring
Feuerbach finally into causal connection with his excursions on
Stirner, Die heilige Familie and Die letzten Philosophen.

“See, that is how Feuerbach had to end!” “Philosophy had to end piously ”, etc.

( Wigand , p. 145.)

The true causal connection, however, is that this exclamation is
an imitation of a passage from Hess’ Die letzten Philosophen aimed
against Bauer, among others (Preface, p. 4):

“Thus [...] and in no other way had the last offspring of the Christian ascetics [...]
to take farewell of the world.”

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Saint Bruno ends his speech for the prosecution against Feuerbach
and his alleged accomplices with the reproach to Feuerbach that all
he can do is to “trumpet”, to “blow blasts on a trumpet”, whereas
Monsieur B. Bauer or Madame la critique, the “mongrel produced”,
to say nothing of the continual “destruction”, “ drives forth in his
triumphal chariot and gathers new triumphs ” (p. 125), “hurls down from
the throne” (p. 119), “slays” (p. Ill), “strikes down like thunder”
(p. 115), “destroys once and for all” (p. 120), “shatters” (p. 121),
allows nature merely to “vegetate” (p. 120), builds “stricter” (!)
“prisons” (p. 104) and, finally, with “crushing” pulpit eloquence
expatiates, on p. 105, in a brisk, pious, cheerful and free3 fashion on
the “stably-strongly-firmly-existing”, hurling “rock-like matter and
rocks” at Feuerbach’s head (p. 1 10) and, in conclusion, by a side
thrust vanquishes Saint Max as well, by adding “the most abstract
abstractness” and “the hardest hardness” (on p. 124) to “critical
criticism”, “social society” and “rock-like matter and rocks”.

All this Saint Bruno accomplished “through himself, in himself
and with himself”, because he is “He himself”; indeed, he is “him-
self always the greatest and can always be the greatest” (is and can
be!) “through himself, in himself and with himself” (p. 136). That’s
that.

Saint Bruno would undoubtedly be dangerous to the female sex,
for he is an “irresistible personality”, if “in the same measure on
the other hand” he did not fear “sensuousness as the barrier
against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow”. Therefore,
“through himself, in himself and with himself” he will hardly pluck
any flowers but rather allow them to wither in infinite longing and
hysterical yearning for the “irresistible personality”, who “possesses
this unique sex and these unique, particular sex organs”.*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:]

5. Saint Bruno in His “Triumphal Chariot”

Before leaving our church father “victorious and confident of victory”, let us for a
moment mingle with the gaping crowd that comes up running just as eagerly when he
“drives forth in his triumphal chariot and gathers new triumphs” as when General
Tom Thumb with his four ponies provides a diversion. It is not surprising that we
hear the humming of street-songs, for to be welcomed with street-songs “belongs after
all to the concept” of triumph “in general”.

a “Brisk, pious, cheerful and free” (“ frisch , fromm, frohlich und frei ”) — the initial
words of a students’ saying, which were turned by Ludwig Jahn into the motto of the
sport movement he initiated. — Ed.

Ill

SAINT MAX45

“Was jehen mir die jrinen Beeme an?”3

Saint Max exploits, “employs” or “uses” the Council to deliver a
long apologetic commentary on “ the book” , which is none other than
“the book”, the book as such, the book pure and simple, i.e., the
perfect book, the Holy Book, the book as something holy, the book as
the holy of holies, the book in heaven, viz., Der Einzige und sein
Eigenthum. “The book”, as we know, fell from the heavens towards
the end of 1844 and took on the shape of a servant with O. Wigand
in Leipzig.46 It was, therefore, at the mercy of the vicissitudes of
terrestrial life and was attacked by three “unique ones”, viz., the
mysterious personality of Szeliga, the gnostic Feuerbach and Hess.h
However much at every moment Saint Max as creator towers over
himself as a creation, as he does over his other creations, he
nevertheless took pity on his weakly offspring and, in order to
defend it and ensure its safety, let out a loud “critical hurrah”. In
order to fathom in all their significance both this “critical hurrah”
and Szeligds mysterious personality, we must here, to some extent,
deal with church history and look more closely at “the book”. Or, to
use the language of Saint Max: we “shall episodically put” “into this
passage” a church-historical “meditation” on Der Einzige und sein
Eigenthum “simply because” “it seems to us that it could contribute to
the elucidation of the rest”.

3 “What are the green trees to me?” — a paraphrase (in the Berlin dialect) of a
sentence from Heine’s work Reisebilder, Dritter Teil “Die Bader von Lucca”, Kapitel
IV.— Ed.

b Szeliga, “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum”; Feuerbach, “Uber das ‘Wesen des
Ch risten thums’ in Beziehung auf den ‘Einzigen und sein Eigenthum’”; Hess,
Die letzten Philosophen. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the
King of Glory shall come in.

“Who is this King of Glory? The War-Lord strong and mighty, the War-Lord
mighty in battle.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the
King of Glory shall come in.

“Who is this King of Glory? The Lord Unique/ he is the King of Glory,” (Psalms,

24:7-10).

In the Bible “The Lord of Hosts”

Ed.

1. THE UNIQUE AND HIS PROPERTY

The man who “has based his cause on nothing”3 begins his
lengthy “critical hurrah” like a good German, straightway with a
jeremiad: “Is there anything that is not to be my cause?” (p. 5 of the
“book”). And he continues lamenting heart-rendingly that “every-
thing is to be his cause”, that “God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of
truth and freedom, and in addition the cause of his people, of his
lord”, and thousands of other good causes, are imposed on him.
Poor fellow! The French and English bourgeois complain about lack
of markets, trade crises, panic on the stock exchange, the political
situation prevailing at the moment, etc.; the German petty
bourgeois, whose active participation in the bourgeois movement has
been merely an ideal one, and who for the rest exposed only himself
to risk, sees his own cause simply as the “good cause”, the “cause of
freedom, truth, mankind”, etc.

Our German school-teacher simply believes this illusion of the
German petty bourgeois and on three pages he provisionally
discusses all these good causes.

He investigates “God’s cause”, “the cause of mankind” (pp. 6
and 7) and finds these are “purely egoistical causes”, that both
“God” and “mankind” worry only about what is theirs, that “truth,
freedom, humanity, justice” are “only interested in themselves and
not in us, only in their own well-being and not in ours” — from which

3 Here and below Marx and Engels paraphrase the first lines of Goethe’s poem
Vanitas! Vanitatum vanitas !: “Ich hab’ mein’ Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.” (“I have
based my cause on nothing.”) “Ich hab’ mein’ Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt” is the heading
of Stirner’s preface to his book. — Ed.

6—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

he concludes that all these persons “are thereby exceptionally well-
off”. He goes so far as to transform these idealistic phrases — God,
truth, etc. — into prosperous burghers who “are exceptionally well-
off” and enjoy a “ profitable egoism”. But this vexes the holy egoist:
“And I?” he exclaims.

“I, for my part, draw the lesson from this and, instead of continuing to serve
these great egoists, I should rather be an egoist myself!” (p. 7)

Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition
to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which
moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique
ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth,
freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.

If it had not been expected of him that he should serve numerous
good causes, he would never have made the discovery that he also
has his “own” cause, and therefore he would never have based this
cause of his “on nothing” (i.e., the “book”).

If Saint Max had looked a little more closely at these various
“causes” and the “owners” of these causes, e.g., God, mankind,
truth, he would have arrived at the opposite conclusion: that egoism
based on the egoistic mode of action of these persons must be just as
imaginary as these persons themselves.

Instead of this, our saint decides to enter into competition with
“God” and “truth” and to base his cause on himself —

“on myself, on the I that is, just as much as God, the nothing of everything else, the I
that is everything for me, the I that is the unique.... I am nothing in the sense of void,
but the creative nothing, the nothing from which I myself, as creator, create
everything.”

The holy church father could also have expressed this last
proposition as follows: I am everything in the void of nonsense, “6ut”
I am the nugatory creator, the all, from which I myself, as creator,
create nothing.

Which of these two readings is the correct one will become evident
later. So much for the preface.

The “book” itself is divided like the book “of old”, into the Old
and New Testament — namely, into the unique history of man (the
Law and the Prophets) and the inhuman history of the unique (the
Gospel of the Kingdom of God). The former is history in the
framework of logic, the logos confined in the past; the latter is logic
in history, the emancipated logos, which struggles against the
present and triumphantly overcomes it.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

121

THE OLD TESTAMENT: MAN47
1. The Book of Genesis, i.e., A Man’s Life

Saint Max pretends here that he is writing the biography of his
mortal enemy, “man”, and not of a “ unique ” or “real individual”.
This ties him up in delightful contradictions.

As becomes every normal genesis “a man’s life” begins ab ovo,
with the “child”. As revealed to us on page 13, the child

“from the outset lives a life of struggle against the entire world, it resists everything
and everything resists it”. “Both remain enemies” but “with awe and respect” and
“are constantly on the watch, looking for each other’s weaknesses ” .

This is further amplified, on page 14:

“we”, as children, “try to find out the basis of things or what lies behind them; there-
fore” (so no longer out of enmity) “we are trying to discover everybody’s weaknesses” .
(Here the finger of Szeliga, the mystery-monger, is evident.3)

Thus, the child immediately becomes a metaphysician, trying to
find out the “ basis of things”.

This speculating child, for whom “the nature of things” lies closer
to his heart than his toys, “sometimes” in the long run, succeeds in
coping with the “world of things”, conquers it and then enters a new
phase, the age of youth, when he has to face a new “arduous struggle
of life”, the struggle against reason, for the “ spirit means the first
self-discovery” and: “We are above the world, we are spirit” (p. 15).
The point of view of the youth is a “heavenly one”; the child merely
“learned”, “he did not dwell on purely logical or theological
problems” — just as (the child) “Pilate” hurriedly passed over the
question: “What is truth?” b (p. 17). The youth “tries to master
thoughts”, he “understands ideas, the spirit ” and “seeks ideas”; he
“is engrossed in thought” (p. 16), he has “absolute thoughts, i.e.,
nothing but thoughts, logical thoughts”. The youth who thus “deports
himself”, instead of chasing after young women and other earthly
things, is no other than the young “Stirner”, the studious Berlin
youth, busy with Hegel’s logic and gazing with amazement at the
great Michelet. Of this youth it is rightly said on page 17:

“to bring to light pure thought, to devote oneself to it — in this is the joy of youth, and
all the bright images of the world of thought — truth, freedom, mankind, Man,
etc. — illumine and inspire the youthful soul.”

This youth then “throws aside” the “object” as well and “occupies
himself” exclusively “with his thoughts”;

a An allusion to Szeliga’s article “Eugen Sue: Die Geheimnisse von Paris.
Kritik”. Cf. present edition, Vol. 4, p. 55. — Ed.
b John 18 : 38. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“he includes all that is not spiritual under the contemptuous name of external things,
and if, all the same, he does cling to such external things as, for example, students’
customs, etc., it happens only when and because he discovers spirit in them, i.e., when
they become symbols for him’’. (Who will not “discover” “Szeliga” here?)

Virtuous Berlin youth! The beer-drinking ritual of the students’
association was for him only a “symbol” and only for the sake of the
“symbol” was he after a drinking bout many a time found under the
table, where he probably also wished to “discover spirit”! — How
virtuous is this good youth, whom old Ewald, who wrote two volumes
on the “virtuous youth”,3 could have taken as a model, is seen also
from the fact that it was “made known” to him (p. 15): “Father and
mother should be abandoned, all natural authority should be
considered broken.” For him, “the rational man, the family as a
natural authority does not exist; there follows a renunciation of
parents, brothers and sisters, etc.” — But they are all “re-born as
spiritual, rational authority”, thanks to which the good youth
reconciles obedience and fear of one’s parents with his speculating
conscience, and everything remains as before. Likewise “it is said”
(p. 15): “We ought to obey God rather than men.”b Indeed, the
good youth reaches the highest peak of morality on page 16, where
“it is said”: “One should obey one’s conscience rather than God.”
This moral exultation raises him even above the “revengeful
Eumenides” and even above the “anger of Poseidon” — he is afraid
of nothing so much as his “conscience”.

Having discovered that “the spirit is the essential” he no longer
even fears the following perilous conclusions:

“If, however, the spirit is recognised as the essential, nevertheless it makes a
difference whether the spirit is poor or rich, and therefore” (!) “ one strives to become rich
in spirit; the spirit wishes to expand, to establish its realm, a realm not of this world,
which has just been overcome. In this way, the spirit strives to become all in all”c (what
way is this?), “i.e., although I am spirit, nevertheless I am not perfect spirit and must” (?)
“first seek the perfect spirit” (p. 17).

“Nevertheless it makes a difference.” — “It”, what is this? What is
the “It” that makes the difference? We shall very often come across
this mysterious “It” in our holy man, and it will then turn out that it
is the unique from the standpoint of substance, the beginning of
“unique” logic, and as such the true identity of Hegel’s “being” and
“nothing”. Hence, for everything that this “It” does, says or

a Johann Ludwig Ewald, Der gute Jungling, gute Gatte und Vater, oder Mittel, um es zu
werden. — Ed.

b The Acts of the Apostles 5 : 29. — Ed.
c 1 Corinthians 15:28. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

123

performs, we shall lay the responsibility on our saint, whose relation
to it is that of its creator. First of all, this “It”, as we have seen, makes
a difference between poor and rich. And why? Because “the spirit is
recognised as the essential”. Poor “It”, which without this recogni-
tion would never have arrived at the difference between poor and
rich! “And therefore one strives”, etc. “ One /” We have here the
second impersonal person which, together with the “It”, is in
Stirner’s service and must perform the heaviest menial work for him.
How these two are accustomed to support each other is clearly seen
here. Since “It” makes a difference whether the spirit is poor or rich,
“one” (could anyone but Stirner’s faithful servant3 have had this
idea!) — “one, therefore, strives to become rich in spirit”. “It” gives the
signal and immediately “one” joins in at the top of its voice. The
division of labour is classically carried out.

Since “one strives to become rich in spirit, the spirit wishes to
expand, to establish its realm" , etc. “If however” a connection is
present here “it still makes a difference” whether “one” wants to
become “ rich in spirit ” or whether “ the spirit wants to establish its
realm”. Up to now “the spirit" has not wanted anything, “the spirit" has
not yet figured as a person — it was only a matter of the spirit of the
“youth”, and not of “the spirit" as such, of the spirit as subject. But our
holy writer now needs a spirit different from that of the youth, in
order to place it in opposition to the latter as a foreign, and in the last
resort, as a holy spirit. Conjuring trick No. 1.

‘.‘In this way the spirit strives to become all in all”, a somewhat
obscure statement, which is then explained as follows:

“Although I am spirit, nevertheless I am not perfect spirit and must first seek the
perfect spirit .J

But if Saint Max is the “imperfect spirit”, “nevertheless it makes a
difference” whether he has to “ perfect ” his spirit or seek “ the perfect
spirit”. A few lines earlier he was in fact dealing only with the “poor"
and “rich” spirit — a quantitative, profane distinction — and now
there suddenly appears the “imperfect” and “ perfect ” spirit — a
qualitative, mysterious distinction. The striving towards the deve-
lopment of one’s own spirit can now be transformed into the hunt of
the “imperfect spirit” for “ the perfect spirit”. The holy spirit
wanders about like a ghost. Conjuring trick No. 2.

The holy author continues:

“But thereby” (i.e., by the transformation of the striving towards “perfection”
of my spirit into the search for “the perfect spirit”) “I, who have only just found myself

a An ironical allusion to F. Szeliga. See this volume, p. 149. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

as spirit, at once lose myself again, in that I bow down before the perfect spirit, as a
spirit which is not my own, but a spirit of the beyond, and I feel my emptiness ” (p. 18).

This is nothing but a further development of conjuring trick
No. 2. After the “perfect spirit” has been assumed as an existing being
and opposed to the “imperfect spirit”, it becomes obvious that the
“imperfect spirit”, the youth, painfully feels his “emptiness” to the
depths of his soul. Let us go on!

“True, it is all a matter of spirit, but is every spirit the right spirit? The right and
true spirit is the ideal of the spirit, the ‘holy spirit’. It is not my or your spirit but
precisely ” (!) — “an ideal spirit, a spirit of the beyond — ‘God’. ‘God is spirit’” (p. 18).

Here the “perfect spirit” has been suddenly transformed into
the “right” spirit, and immediately afterwards into the “right and
true spirit”. The latter is more closely defined as the “ideal of the
spirit, the holy spirit” and this is proved by the fact that it is “not my
or your spirit but precisely, a spirit of the beyond, an ideal
spirit — God”. The true spirit is the ideal of the spirit, “precisely”
because it is ideall It is the holy spirit “precisely” because it is — God!
What “virtuosity of thought”! We note also in passing that up to now
nothing was said about “your” spirit. Conjuring trick No. 3.

Thus, if I seek to train myself as a mathematician, or, as Saint Max
puts it, to “perfect” myself as a mathematician, then I am seeking the
“perfect” mathematician, i.e., the “right and true” mathematician,
the “ideal” of the mathematician, the “holy” mathematician, who is
distinct from me and you (although in my eyes you may be a perfect
mathematician, just as for the Berlin youth his professor of
philosophy is the perfect spirit); but a mathematician who is
“precisely ideal, of the beyond”, the mathematician in the heavens,
“God”. God is a mathematician.

Saint Max arrives at all these great results because “it makes a
difference whether the spirit is rich or poor”; i.e., in plain language,
it makes a difference whether anyone is rich or poor in spirit, and
because his “youth” has discovered this remarkable fact.

On page 18 Saint Max continues:

“ It divides the man from the youth that the former takes the world as it is”, etc.

Consequently, we do not learn how the youth arrives at the point
where he suddenly takes the world “as it is”, nor do we see our holy
dialectician making the transition from youth to man, we merely
learn that “It” has to perform this service and “ divide ” the youth
from the man. But even this “It” by itself does not suffice to bring
the cumbersome waggonload of unique thoughts into motion. For

John 4 : 24.— Ed.

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after “/l” has “divided the man from the youth”, the man all the
same relapses again into the youth, begins to occupy himself afresh
“exclusively with the spirit” and does not get going until “one”
hurries to his assistance with a change of horses. “Only when one has
grown fond of oneself corporeally, etc.” (p. 18), “only then”
everything goes forward smoothly again, the man discovers that he
has a personal interest, and arrives at “the second self-discovery” , in
that he not only “finds himself as spirit”, like the youth, “and then at
once loses himself again in the universal spirit”, but finds himself “as
corporeal spirit” (p. 19). This “corporeal spirit” finally arrives at
having an “interest not only in its own spirit” (like the youth), “but in
total satisfaction, in the satisfaction of the whole fellow” (an interest
in the satisfaction of the whole fellow!) — he arrives at the point
where “he is pleased with himself exactly as he is”. Being a German,
Stirner’s “man” arrives at everything very late. He could see,
sauntering along the Paris boulevards or in London’s Regent Street,
hundreds of “young men”, fops and dandies who have not yet found
themselves as “corporeal spirits” and are nevertheless “pleased with
themselves exactly as they are”, and whose main interest lies in the
“satisfaction of the whole fellow!’

This second “self-discovery” fills our holy dialectician with such
enthusiasm that he suddenly forgets his role and begins to speak not
of the man, but of himself, and reveals that he himself, he the unique,
is “the man”, and that “the man” = “the unique”. A new conjuring
trick.

“How I find myself” (it should read: “how the youth finds himself”) “behind the
things, and indeed as spirit, so subsequently, too, I must find myself” (it should read:
“the man must find himself”) “behind the thoughts, i.e., as their creator and owner. In
the period of spirits, thoughts outgrew me” (the youth), “although they were the
offspring of my brain; like delirious fantasies they floated around me and agitated me
greatly, a dreadful power. The thoughts became themselves corporeal, they were
spectres like God, the Emperor, the Pope, the Fatherland, etc.; by destroying their
corporeality, I take them back into my own corporeality and announce : I alone am
corporeal. And now I take the world as it is for me, as my world, as my property: I
relate everything to myself.”

Thus, the man, identified here with the “unique”, having first
given thoughts corporeality, i.e., having transformed them into
spectres, now destroys this corporeality again, by taking them back
into his own body, which he thus makes into a body of spectres. The
fact that he arrives at his own corporeality only through the negation
of the spectres, shows the nature of this constructed corporeality of
the man, which he has first to “announce” to “himself”, in order to
believe in it. But what he “announces to himself” he does not even
“announce” correctly. The fact that apart from his “unique” body

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there are not also to be found in his head all kinds of independent
bodies, spermatozoa, he transforms into the “fable”*: I alone am
corporeal. Another conjuring trick.

Further, the man who, as a youth, stuffed his head with all kinds of
nonsense about existing powers and relations such as the Emperor,
the Fatherland, the State, etc., and knew them only as his own
“delirious fantasies”, in the form of his conceptions — this man,
according to Saint Max, actually destroys all these powers by getting out of
his head his false opinion of them. On the contrary: now that he no
longer looks at the world through the spectacles of his fantasy, he has
to think of the practical interrelations of the world, to get to know
them and to act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic
corporeality which the world had for him, he finds its real
corporeality outside his fantasy. With the disappearance of the
spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not
the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the
actual power of whom he can now at last appreciate in all its scope.
Conjuring trick No. 3 [a].

The youth as a man does not even react critically towards ideas
which are valid also for others and are current as categories, but is
critical only of those ideas that are the “mere offspring of his brain”,
i.e., general concepts about existing conditions reproduced in his
brain. Thus, for example, he does not even resolve the category
“Fatherland”, but only his personal opinion of this category, after
which the generally valid category still remains, and even in the
sphere of “philosophical thought” the work is only just beginning.
Fie wants, however, to make us believe that he has destroyed the
category itself because he has destroyed his emotional personal
relation to it — exactly as he has wanted to make us believe that he
has destroyed the power of the Emperor by giving up his fantastic
conception of the Emperor. Conjuring trick No. 4.

“ And now,” continues Saint Max, “I take the world as it is for me, as my world,
as my property.”

He takes the world as it is for him, i.e., as he is compelled to take it,
and thereby he has appropriated the world for himself, has made it his
property — a mode of acquisition which, indeed, is not mentioned by
any of the economists, but the method and success of which will be
the more brilliantly disclosed in “the book”. Basically, however, he
“takes” not the “world”, but only his “delirious fantasy” about the
world as his own, and makes it his property. He takes the world as his

a In German a play on words: Ich sage — I say, I announce and die Sage —
fable, myth, saga. — Ed.

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conception of the world, and the world as his conception is his
imagined property, the property of his .conception, his conception as
property, his property as conception, his own peculiar conception,
or his conception of property; and all this he expresses in the
incomparable phrase: “I relate everything to myself.”

After the man has recognised, as the saint himself admits, that the
world was only populated by spectres, because the youth saw
spectres, after the illusory world of the youth has disappeared for the
man, the latter finds himself in a real world, independent of youthful
fancies.

And so, it should therefore read, I take the world as it is
independently of myself, in the form in which it belongs to itself (“the
man takes” — see page 18 — “the world as it is”, and not as he
would like it to be), in the first place as my non-property (hitherto it
was my property only as a spectre); I relate myself to everything and
only to that extent do I relate everything to myself.

“If I as spirit rejected the world with the deepest contempt for it, then I as
proprietor reject the spectres or ideas into their emptiness. They no longer have
power over me, just as no ‘earthly force’ has power over the spirit” (p. 20).

We see here that the proprietor, Stirner’s man, at once enters
into possession, sine beneficio deliberandi atque inventarii ,a of the
inheritance of the youth which, according to his own statement,
consists only of “delirious fantasies” and “spectres”. He believes that
in the process of changing from a child into a youth he had truly
coped with the world of things, and in the process of changing from
a youth into a man he had truly coped with the world of the spirit,
that now, as a man, he has the whole world in his pocket and has
nothing more to trouble him. If, according to the words of the youth
which he repeats, no earthly force outside him has any power over
the spirit, and hence the spirit is the supreme power on earth — and
he, the man, has forced this omnipotent spirit into subjection to
himself — is he not then completely omnipotent? He forgets that he
has only destroyed the fantastic and spectral form assumed by the
idea of “Fatherland”, etc., in the brain of the “youth”, but that he
has still not touched these ideas, insofar as they express actual relations.
Far from having become the master of ideas — he is only now
capable of arriving at “ideas”.

“Now, let us say in conclusion, it can be clearly seen” (p. 199) that
the holy man has brought his interpretation of the different stages of

a Without the advantage of deliberation and inventory — the right of deliberation
and inventory is an old principle of the law of inheritance, which grants the heir time
to decide whether he wants to accept or to reject a legacy. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

life to the desired and predestined goal. He informs us of the result
achieved in a thesis that is a spectral shade which we shall now
confront with its lost body.

Unique thesis, p. 20.

“The child was realistic, in thrall to the
things of this world, until little by little he
succeeded in penetrating behind these very
things. The youth was idealistic, inspired
by thoughts, until he worked his way up
to become a man, the egoistic man, who
deals with things and thoughts as he
pleases and puts his personal interest
above everything. Finally, the old man?
It will be time enough to speak of this
when I become one.”

Owner of the accompanying liberated
shade.

The child was actually in thrall to the
world of his things, until little by little (a bor-
rowed conjuring trick standing for de-
velopment) he succeeded in leaving these
very things behind him. The youth was
fanciful and was made thoughtless by his
enthusiasm, until he was brought down
by the man, the egoistic burgher, with
whom things and thoughts deal as they
please, because his personal interest puts
everything above him. Finally, the old
man? — “Woman, what have I to do with
thee?” a

The entire history of “a man’s life” amounts, therefore, “let us
say in conclusion”, to the following:

1. Stirner regards the various stages of life only as “self-discov-
eries” of the individual, and these “self-discoveries” are moreover
always reduced to a definite relation of consciousness. Thus the
variety of consciousness is here the life of the individual. The physical
and social changes which take place in the individuals and produce
an altered consciousness are, of course, of no concern to Stirner. In
Stirner’s work, therefore, child, youth and man always find the world
ready-made, just as they merely “find” “themselves”; absolutely
nothing is done to ensure that there should be something which can
in fact be found. But even the relation of consciousness is not correctly
understood either, but only in its speculative distortion. Hence, too,
all these figures have a philosophical attitude to the world — “the
child is realistic ”, “the youth is idealistic ”, the man is the negative
unity of the two, absolute negativity, as is evident from the
above-quoted final proposition. Here the secret of “a man’s life”
is revealed, here it becomes clear that the “child” was only a
disguise of “realism”, the “youth” a disguise of “idealism”, the “man”
of an attempted solution of this philosophical antithesis. This solution,
this “absolute negativity” , is arrived at — it is now seen — only thanks
to the man blindly taking on trust the illusions both of the child and

John 2 : 4. — Ed.

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of the youth, believing thus to have overcome the world of things and
the world of the spirit.

2. Since Saint Max pays no attention to the physical and social
“life” of the individual, and says nothing at all about “life”, he quite
consistently abstracts from historical epochs, nationalities, classes,
etc., or, which is the same thing, he inflates the consciousness
predominant in the class nearest to him in his immediate environ-
ment into the normal consciousness of “a man’s life”. In order to rise
above this local and pedantic narrow-mindedness he has only to
confront “his” youth with the first young clerk he encounters, a
young English factory worker or young Yankee, not to mention the
young Kirghiz-Kazakhs.

3. Our saint’s enormous gullibility — the true spirit of his
book — is not content with causing his youth to believe in his child,
and his man to believe in his youth. The illusions which some
“youths”, “men”, etc., have or claim to have about themselves, are
without any examination accepted by Stirner himself and confused
with the “ life ”, with the reality, of these highly ambiguous youths and
men.

4. The prototype of the entire structure of the stages of life has
already been depicted in the third part of Hegel’s Encyclopddiea and
“in various transformations” in other passages in Hegel as well. Saint
Max, pursuing “his own” purposes, had, of course, to undertake
certain “transformations” here also. Whereas Hegel, for example, is
still to such an extent guided by the empirical world that he portrays
the German burgher as the servant of the world around him, Stirner
has to make him the master of this world, which he is not even in
imagination. Similarly, Saint Max pretends that he does not speak of
the old man for empirical reasons; he wishes to wait until he becomes
one himself (here, therefore, “a man’s life” = his unique life). Hegel
briskly sets about constructing the four stages of the human life
because, in the real world, the negation is posited twice, i.e., as moon
and as comet (cf. Hegel’s Naturphilosophieb), and therefore the
quaternity here takes the place of the trinity. Stirner finds his own
uniqueness in making moon and comet coincide and so abolishes the
unfortunate old man from “a man’s life”. The reason for this
conjuring trick becomes evident as soon as we examine the
construction of the unique history of man.

a G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopddie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse.
C. Die Philosophic des Geistes. — Ed.

b G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Naturphilosophie. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

2. The Economy of the Old Testament

We must here, for a moment, jump from the “Law” to the
“Prophets”, since at this point already we reveal the secret of unique
domestic economy in heaven and on earth. In the Old Testament,
too — where the law, man, still is a school-master of the unique
(Galatians 3:24) — the history of the kingdom of the unique follows
a wise plan fixed from eternity. Everything has been foreseen
and preordained in order that the unique could appear in the
world, when the time had come3 to redeem holy people from their
holiness.

The first book, “A Man’s Life”, is also called the “Book of
Genesis”, because it contains in embryo the entire domestic economy
of the unique, because it gives us a prototype of the whole
subsequent development up to the moment when the time comes for
the end of the world. The entire unique history revolves round
three stages: child, youth and man, who return “in various
transformations” and in ever widening circles until, finally, the
entire history of the world of things and the world of the spirit is
reduced to “child, youth and man”. Everywhere we shall find
nothing but disguised “child, youth and man”, just as we already
discovered in them three disguised categories.

We spoke above of the German philosophical conception of
history. Here, in Saint Max, we find a brilliant example of it. The
speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of
history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of
philosophy. But even the latter is not conceived as, according to
existing sources, it actually took place — not to mention how it
evolved under the influence of real historical relations — but as it was
understood and described by recent German philosophers, in
particular Hegel and Feuerbach. And from these descriptions again
only that was selected which could be adapted to the given end, and
which came into the hands of our saint by tradition. Thus, history
becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and
ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this
ghostly history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts;
from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts
with the appearance of reality. In making this experiment our
saint frequently forgets his role and writes an undisguised ghost-
story.

In his case we find this method of making history in its most naive,
most classic simplicity. Three simple categories — realism, idealism

Galatians 4 : 4. — Ed.

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and absolute negativity (here named “egoism”) as the unity of the
two— which we have already encountered in the shape of the child,
youth and man, are made the basis of all history and are embellished
with various historical signboards; together with their modest suite
of auxiliary categories they form the content of all the allegedly
historical phases which are trotted out. Saint Max once again reveals
here his boundless faith by pushing to greater extremes than any of
his predecessors faith in the speculative content of history dished up
by German philosophers. In this solemn and tedious construction of
history, therefore, all that matters is to find a pompous series
of resounding names for three categories that are so hackneyed
that they no longer dare to show themselves publicly under their
own names. Our anointed author could perfectly well have
passed from the “man” (p. 20) immediately to the “ego” (p. 201) or
better still to the “unique” (p. 485); but that would have been
too simple. Moreover, the strong competition among the Ger-
man speculative philosophers makes it the duty of each new com-
petitor to offer an ear-splitting historical advertisement for his
commodity.

“The force of true development”, to use Dottore Graziano’s words,
“proceeds most forcibly” in the following “transformations”:

Basis:

I. Realism.

II. Idealism.

III. The negative unity of the two. “One” (p. 485),

First nomenclature:

I. Child, dependent on things (realism).

II. Youth, dependent on ideas (idealism).

III. Man — (as the negative unity)

expressed positively:

the owner of ideas and things
expressed negatively:

free from ideas and things
Second , historical nomenclature:

I. Negro (realism, child).

II. Mongol (idealism, youth).

III. Caucasian (negative unity of realism and idealism, man).
Third, most general nomenclature:

I. Realistic egoist (egoist in the ordinary sense) — child, Negro.

II. Idealist egoist (devotee) — youth, Mongol.

III. True egoist (the unique) — man, Caucasian.

Fourth, historical nomenclature. Repetition of the preceding stages
within the category of the Caucasian.

► (egoism)

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

I. The Ancients. Negroid Caucasians — childish men — pagans —
dependent on things — realists — the world.

Transition (child penetrating behind the “things of this world”):
Sophists, Sceptics, etc.

II. The Modems. Mongoloid Caucasians — youthful men — Chris-
tians— dependent on ideas — idealists — spirit.

1 . Pure history of spirits,3 Christianity as spirit. “The spirit.”

2. Impure history of spirits. Spirit in relation to others. “The
Possessed”.

A. Purely impure history of spirits.

a) The apparition, the ghost, the spirit in the Negroid
state, as thing-like spirit and spiritual thing — objec-
tive being for the Christian, spirit as child.

b) The whimsy, the fixed idea, the spirit in the Mongolian
condition, as spiritual in the spirit, determination
in consciousness, conceptual being in the Christian —
spirit as youth.

B. Impurely impure (historical) history of spirits.

a) Catholicism — Middle Ages (the Negro, child, real-

ism, etc.).

b) Protestantism — modern times in modern times —
(Mongol, youth, idealism, etc.).

Within Protestantism it is possible to make further
subdivisions, for example:

a) English philosophy — realism, child, Negro.

[3) German philosophy — idealism, youth, Mongol.

3. The Hierarchy — negative unity of the two within the Mon-
goloid-Caucasian point of view. Such unity appears where
historical relations are changed into actually existing rela-
tions or where opposites are presented as existing side
by side. Here, therefore, we have two co-existing stages:

A. The “ uneducated ,b (evil ones, bourgeois, egoists in the
ordinary sense) = Negroes, children, Catholics, realists,
etc.

B. The “ educated ’ (good ones, citoyens, devotees, priests,
etc.) = Mongols, youths, Protestants, idealists.

a In the German original Geistergeschichte, that is, “ghost-story” ( Geister — ghosts
or spirits; Geschichte — story or history). In this volume, however, it has usually been
rendered as “history of spirits” to bring out more clearly the connection with the
words that precede or follow it. — Ed.

Here and later the authors ironically use Berlin dialect words for uneducated
( Unjebildete ) and educated (Jebildete ). — Ed.

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These two stages exist side by side and hence it follows
“easily” that the “educated” rule over the “uneducated” — this
is the hierarchy. In the further course of historical development
there arises then

the non-Hegelian from the “uneducated”,
the Hegelian from the “educated”,*
from which it follows that the Hegelians rule over the non-
Hegelians. In this way Stirner converts the speculative notion
of the domination of the speculative idea in history into the
notion of the domination of the speculative philosophers
themselves. The view of history hitherto held by him — the
domination of the idea — becomes in the hierarchy a relation
actually existing at present; it becomes the world domination of
ideologists. This shows how deeply Stirner has plunged into
speculation. This domination of the speculative philosophers
and ideologists is finally developing, “for the time has come”
for it, into the following, concluding nomenclature:

a) Political liberalism, dependent on things, independent of
persons — realism, child, Negro, the ancient, apparition,
Catholicism, the “uneducated”, masterless.

b) Social liberalism, independent of things, dependent on the
spirit, without object — idealism, youth, Mongol, the mod-
ern, whimsy, Protestantism, the “educated”, propertyless.

c) Humane liberalism, masterless and propertyless, that is
godless, for God is simultaneously the supreme master and
the supreme possession, hierarchy — negative unity in the
sphere of liberalism and, as such, domination over the
world of things and thoughts; at the same time the perfect
egoist in the abolition of egoism — the perfect hierarchy. At
the same time, it forms the

Transition (youth penetrating behind the world of thoughts) to

III. the ‘ "ego” — i.e., the perfect Christian, the perfect man, the
Caucasian Caucasian and true egoist, who — -just as the
Christian became spirit through the supersession of the
ancient world — becomes a corporeal being3 through the
dissolution of the realm of spirits, by entering, sine beneficio
deliberandi et inventarii, into the inheritance of idealism, the

* “The shaman and the speculative philosopher denote the lowest and the highest
point in the scale of the inner man, the Mongol” (p. 453).

a In German a pun on der Leibhaftige, which can mean corporeal being or the
devil. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

youth, the Mongol, the modern, the Christian, the possessed,
the whimsical, the Protestant, the “educated”, the Hegelian
and the humane liberal.

NB. 1. “At times” Feuerbachian and other categories, such as
reason, the heart, etc., may be also “included episodically”, should a
suitable occasion arise, to heighten the colour of the picture and to
produce new effects. It goes without saying that these, too, are only
new disguises of the ever present idealism and realism.

2. The very pious Saint Max, Jacques le bonhomme, has nothing
real and mundane to say about real mundane history, except that
under the name of “nature”, the “world of things”, the “world of
the child”, etc., he always opposes it to consciousness, as an object of
speculation of the latter, as a world which, in spite of its continual
annihilation, continues to exist in a mystical darkness, in order to
reappear on every convenient occasion — probably because children
and Negroes continue to exist, and hence also their world, the
so-called world of things, “easily” continues to exist. Concerning
such historical and non-historical constructions, good old Hegel
wrote with regard to Schelling — the model for all constructors — that
one can say the following in this context:

“It is no more difficult to handle the instrument of this monotonous formalism
than a painter’s palette which has only two colours, say black” (realistic, childish,
Negroid, etc.) “and yellow”3 (idealist, youthful, Mongolian, etc.), “in order to use the
former to paint a surface when something historical” (the “world of things”) “is
required, and the latter when a landscape” (“heaven”, spirit, holiness, etc.) “is
needed” ( Phanomenologie , p. 39).

“Ordinary consciousness” has even more pointedly ridiculed
constructions of this kind in the following song:

The master sent out John

And told him to cut the hay;

But John did not cut the hay
Nor did he come back home.

Then the master sent out the dog
And told him to bite John;

But the dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

Then the master sent out the stick
And told it to beat the dog;

But the stick did not beat the dog,

The dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

a Hegel mentions red and green as examples. — Ed.

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Then the master sent out fire
And told it to burn the stick;

But the fire did not burn the stick,

The stick did not beat the dog,

The dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

Then the master sent out water
And told it to put out the fire;

But the water did not put out the fire,
The fire did not burn the stick.

The stick did not beat the dog,

The dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

Then the master sent out the ox
And told it to drink the water;

But the ox did not drink the water,

The water did not put out the fire,

The fire did not burn the stick.

The stick did not beat the dog,

The dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

Then the master sent out the butcher
And told him to slaughter the ox;

But the butcher did not slaughter the ox,
The ox did not drink the water,

The water did not put out the fire,

The fire did not burn the stick,

The stick did not beat the dog,

The dog did not bite John,

John did not cut the hay

And they did not come back home.

Then the master sent out the hangman
And told him to hang the butcher;

The hangman did hang the butcher,

The butcher slaughtered the ox,

The ox drank the water ,

The water put out the fire.

The fire burnt the stick.

The stick beat the dog.

The dog bit John,

John cut the hay.

And they all came back home.3

A German nursery rhyme. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

We shall now see with what “virtuosity of thought” and with what
schoolboy ish material Jacques le bonhomme elaborates on this
scheme.

3. The Ancients

Properly speaking we ought to begin here with the Negroes; but
Saint Max, who undoubtedly sits in the “Council of Guardians”, in
his unfathomable wisdom introduces the Negroes only later, and
even then “without any claim to thoroughness and authenticity”. If,
therefore, we make Greek philosophy precede the Negro era, i.e.,
the campaigns of Sesostris and Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt,48 it is
because we are confident that our holy author has arranged
everything wisely.

“Let us, therefore, take a look at the activities which tempt”
Stirner’s ancients.

‘“For the ancients, the world was a truth,’ says Feuerbach; but he forgets to make the
important addition: a truth, the untruth of which they sought to penetrateand, finally,
did indeed penetrate” (p. 22).

“For the ancients”, their “world” (not the world) “was a
truth” — whereby, of course, no truth about the ancient world is
stated, but only that the ancients did not have a Christian attitude to
their world. As soon as untruth penetrated their world (i.e., as soon as
this world itself disintegrated in consequence of practical con-
flicts— and to demonstrate this materialistic development empirically
would be the only thing of interest), the ancient philosophers sought
to penetrate the world of truth or the truth of their world and then,
of course, they found that it had become untrue. Their very search
was itself a symptom of the internal collapse of this world. Jacques le
bonhomme transforms the idealist symptom into the material cause
of the collapse and, as a German church father, makes antiquity itself
seek its own negation, Christianity. For him this position of antiquity
is inevitable because the ancients are “ children ’ who seek to
penetrate the “world of things”. “And that is fairly easy too”: by
transforming the ancient world into the later consciousness regard-
ing the ancient world, Jacques le bonhomme can, of course, jump
in a single leap from the materialistic ancient world to the world of
religion, to Christianity. Now the “word of God” immediately
emerges in opposition to the real world of antiquity; the Christian
conceived as the modern sceptic emerges in opposition to the ancient
man conceived as philosopher. His Christian “is never convinced of
the vanity of the word of God” and, in consequence of this lack of

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conviction, he “believes” “in its eternal and invincible truth” (p. 22).
Just as Stirner’s ancient is ancient because he is a non-Christian, not
yet a Christian or a hidden Christian, so his primitive Christian is a
Christian because he is a non-atheist, not yet an atheist or a hidden
atheist. Stirner, therefore, causes Christianity to be negated by the
ancients and modern atheism by the primitive Christians, instead of
the reverse. Jacques le bonhomme, like all other speculative
philosophers, seizes everything by its philosophical tail. A few more
examples of this child-like gullibility immediately follow.

“The Christian must consider himself a ‘stranger on the earth’ (Epistle to the
Hebrews 11 : 13)” (p. 23).

On the contrary, the strangers on earth (arising from extremely
natural causes e.g., the colossal concentration of wealth in the whole
Roman world, etc., etc.) had to consider themselves Christians. It was
not their Christianity that made them vagrants, but their vagrancy
that made them Christians.

On the same page the holy father jumps straight from Sophocles’
Antigone and the sacredness of the burial ceremonial connected with
it to the Gospel of Matthew, 8:22 (let the dead bury their dead), while
Hegel, at any rate in the Phanomenologie, gradually passes from
the Antigone, etc., to the Romans. With equal right Saint Max
could have passed at once to the Middle Ages and, together with
Hegel, have advanced this biblical statement against the Crusaders or
even, in order to be quite original, have contrasted the burial of
Polynices by Antigone with the transfer of the ashes of Napoleon
from St. Helena to Paris. It is stated further:

“In Christianity the inviolable truth of family ties” (which on page 22 is noted as
one of the “truths” of the ancients) “is depicted as an untruth which should be got rid
of as quickly as possible (Mark, 10 : 29) and so in everything” (p. 23).

This proposition, in which reality is again turned upside-down,
should be put the right way up as follows: the actual untruth of
family ties (concerning which, inter alia, the still existing documents
of pre-Christian Roman legislation should be examined) is depicted
in Christianity as an inviolable truth, “and so in everything”.

From these examples, therefore, it is superabundantly evident
how Jacques le bonhomme, who strives to “get rid as quickly as
possible” of empirical history, stands facts on their heads, causes
material history to be produced by ideal history, “and so in
everything”. At the outset we learn only the alleged attitude of the
ancients to their world; as dogmatists they are put in opposition to
the ancient world, their own world, instead of appearing as its
creators; it is a question only of the relation of consciousness to the

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object, to truth; it is a question, therefore, only of the philosophical
relation of the ancients to their world — ancient history is replaced by
the history of ancient philosophy, and this only in the form in which
Saint Max imagines it according to Hegel and Feuerbach.

Thus the history of Greece, from the time of Pericles inclusively, is
reduced to a struggle of abstractions: reason, spirit, heart, worldli-
ness, etc. These are the Greek parties. In this ghostly world, which is
presented as the Greek world, allegorical persons such as Madame
Purity of Heart “machinate” and mythical figures like Pilate (who
must never be missing where there are children) find a place quite
seriously side by side with Timon of Phlius.

After presenting us with some astounding revelations about the
Sophists and Socrates, Saint Max immediately jumps to the Sceptics.
He discovers that they completed the work which Socrates began.
Hence the positive philosophy of the Greeks that followed im-
mediately after the Sophists and Socrates, especially Aristotle’s
encyclopaedic learning, does not exist at all for Jacques le
bonhomme. He strives “to get rid as quickly as possible” of the past
and hurries to the transition to the “moderns”, finding this
transition in the Sceptics, Stoics and Epicureans. Let us see what our
holy father has to reveal about them.

“The Stoics wish to realise the ideal of the wise man ... the man who knows how to
live ... they find this ideal in contempt for the world, in a life without living
development [...] without friendly intercourse with the world, i.e., in a life of isolation
[...] not in a life in common with others; the Stoic alone lives, for him everything else is
dead. The Epicureans, on the other hand, demand an active life” (p. 30).

We refer Jacques le bonhomme — the man who wants to realise
himself and who knows how to live — to, inter alia, Diogenes Laertius:
there he will discover that the wise man, the sophos, is nothing but the
idealised Stoic, not the Stoic the realised wise man; he will discover
that the sophos is by no means only a Stoic but is met with just as much
among the Epicureans, the Neo-academists and the Sceptics.
Incidentally, the sophos is the first form in which the Greek philosophos
confronts us; he appears mythologically in the seven wise men, in
practice in Socrates, and as an ideal among the Stoics, Epicureans,
Neo-academists49 and Sceptics. Each of these schools, of course, has
its own ffotpog ,a just as Saint Bruno has his own “unique sex”. Indeed,
Saint Max can find “le sage ” again in the eighteenth century in the
philosophy of Enlightenment, and even in Jean Paul in the shape of
the “wise men” like Emanuel, b etc. The Stoical wise man by no means

a Wise man. — Ed.

b Jean Paul, Hesperus oder 45 Hundsposttage. — Ed.

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has in mind “life without living development”, but an absolutely active
life, as is evident even from his concept of nature, which is
Heraclitean, dynamic, developing and living, while for the
Epicureans the principle of the concept of nature is the mors
immortalise as Lucretius says, the atom, and, in opposition to
Aristotle’s divine energy, divine leisure is put forward as the ideal of
life instead of “active life”.

“The ethics of the Stoics (their only science, for they were unable to say anything
about the spirit except what its relation to the world should be; and about
nature — physics — they could say only that the wise man has to assert himself against it)
is not a doctrine of the spirit, but merely a doctrine of rejection of the world and of
self-assertion against the world” (p. 31).

The Stoics were able to “say about nature” that physics is one of
the most important sciences for the philosopher and consequently
they even went to the trouble of further developing the physics of
Heraclitus; they were “further able to say” that the wpa , masculine
beauty, is the highest that the individual could represent, and
glorified life in tune with nature, although they fell into contradic-
tions in so doing. According to the Stoics, philosophy is divided into
three doctrines: “physics, ethics, logic”.

“They compare philosophy to the animal and to the egg, logic — to the bones and
sinews of the animal, and to the outer shell of the egg, ethics — to the flesh of the
animal and to the albumen of the egg, and physics — to the soul of the animal and to the
yolk of the egg” (Diogenes Laertius, Zeno).

From this alone it is evident how little true it is to say that “ethics is
the only science of the Stoics”. It should be added also that, apart
from Aristotle, they were the chief founders of formal logic and
systematics in general.

That the “Stoics were unable to say anything about the spirit” is so
little true that even seeing spirits originated from them, on account of
which Epicurus opposes them, as an Enlightener, and ridicules them
as “old women”, b while precisely the Neo-Platonists borrowed part
of their tales about spirits from the Stoics. This spirit-seeing of the
Stoics arises, on the one hand, from the impossibility of achieving a
dynamic concept of nature without the material furnished by
empirical natural science, and, on the other hand, from their effort
to interpret the ancient Greek world and even religion in a
speculative manner and make them analogous to the thinking spirit.

The “ethics of the Stoics” is so much a “doctrine of world rejection
and of self-assertion against the world” that, for example, it was

a Immortal death. Lucretius, De rerum natura libri sex. Book 3, Verse 882. — Ed.
b See present edition, Vol. 1, p. 43. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

counted a Stoical virtue to “have a sound fatherland, a worthy
friend”, that “the beautiful alone” is declared to be “the good”, and
that the Stoical wise man is allowed to mingle with the world in every
way, for example, to commit incest, etc., etc. The Stoical wise man is
to such an extent caught up “in a life of isolation and not in a life in
common with others” that it is said of him in Zeno:

“Let not the wise man wonder at anything that seems wonderful — but neither will
the worthy man live in solitude, for he is social by nature and active in practice ”
(Diogenes Laertius, Book VII, 1).

Incidentally, it would be asking too much to demand that, for the
sake of refuting this schoolboyish wisdom of Jacques le bonhomme,
one should set forth the very complicated and contradictory ethics of
the Stoics.

In connection with the Stoics, Jacques le bonhomme has to note the
existence of the Romans also (p. 31), of whom, of course, he is unable
to say anything, since they have no philosophy. The only thing we
hear of them is that Horace (!) “did not go beyond the Stoics’ worldly
wisdom” (p. 32). Integer vitae, scelerisque purus /a

In connection with the Stoics, Democritus is also mentioned in the
following way: a muddled passage of Diogenes Laertius ( Democritus ,
Book IX, 7, 45), which in addition has been inaccurately translated, is
copied out from some textbook, and made the basis for a lengthy
diatribe about Democritus. This diatribe has the distinguishing
feature of being in direct contradiction to its basis, i.e., to the
above-mentioned muddled and inaccurately translated passage, and
converts “peace of mind” (Stirner’s translation of evJ'dufiia. , in Low
German Wellmuth ) into “rejection of the world”. The fact is that
Stirner imagines that Democritus was a Stoic, and indeed of the sort
that the unique and the ordinary schoolboyish consciousness
conceive a Stoic to be. Stirner thinks that “his whole activity amounts
to an endeavour to detach himself from the world”, “hence to a
rejection of the world”, and that in the person of Democritus he can
refute the Stoics. That the eventful life of Democritus, who had
wandered through the world a great deal, flagrantly contradicts this
notion of Saint Max’s; that the real source from which to learn about
the philosophy of Democritus is Aristotle and not a couple of
anecdotes from Diogenes Laertius; that Democritus, far from
rejecting the world, was, on the contrary, an empirical natural
scientist and the first encyclopaedic mind among the Greeks; that his
almost unknown ethics was limited to a few remarks which he is

a He of life without flaw, pure from sin. Horace, The Odes, Book 1 — Ode XXII.
Verse 1. — Ed.

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alleged to have made when he was an old, much-travelled man; that
his writings on natural science can be called philosophy only per
abusum ,a because for him, in contrast to Epicurus, the atom was only
a physical hypothesis, an expedient for explaining facts, just as it is in
the proportional combinations of modern chemistry (Dalton and
others) — all this does not suit the purpose of Jacques le bonhomme.
Democritus must be understood in the “unique” fashion, Demo-
critus speaks of euthymia, hence of peace of mind, hence of
withdrawal into oneself, hence of rejection of the world. Democritus
is a Stoic, and he differs from the Indian fakir mumbling “Brahma”
(the word should have been “Om”),50 only as the comparative differs
from the superlative, i.e., “only in degree

Of the Epicureans our friend knows exactly as much as he does of
the Stoics, viz., the unavoidable schoolboy’s minimum. He contrasts
the Epicurean “hedone” b with the “ataraxia”c of the Stoics and
Sceptics, not knowing that this “ataraxia” is also to be found in
Epicurus and, moreover, as something placed higher than the
“hedone” — in consequence of which his whole contrast falls to the
ground. He tells us that the Epicureans “teach only a different attitude
to the world” from that of the Stoics; but let him show us the
(non-Stoic) philosopher of “ancient or modern times” who does not
do “only” the same. Finally, Saint Max enriches us with a new dictum
of the Epicureans: “the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy”.
Hitherto it was only known that the Epicureans made statements in
the sense that the world must be disillusioned, and especially freed
from fear of gods, for the world is my friend.

To give our saint some indication of the real base on which the
philosophy of Epicurus rests, it is sufficient to mention that the idea
that the state rests on the mutual agreement of people, on a contrat
social (au\>-&fxrj d), is found for the first time in Epicurus.

The extent to which Saint Max’s disclosures about the Sceptics
follow the same line is already evident from the fact that he considers
their philosophy more radical than that of Epicurus. The Sceptics
reduced the theoretical relation of people to things to appearance,
and in practice they left everything as of old, being guided by this
appearance just as much as others are guided by actuality; they
merely gave it another name. Epicurus, on the other hand, was the
true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient
religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans,

a By abuse, i. e., improperly, wrongly. — Ed.
b Pleasure. — Ed.

L Equanimity, imperturbability, intrepidity. — Ed.
d Contract (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 409-10). — Ed.

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insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius
praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods
and trample religion underfoot; for this reason among all church
fathers, from Plutarch to Luther, Epicurus has always had the
reputation of being the atheist philosopher par excellence , and was
called a swine; for which reason, too, Clement of Alexandria says
that when Paul takes up arms against philosophy he has in mind
Epicurean philosophy alone. ( Stromatum , Book I [chap. XI], p. 295,
Cologne edition, 1688.a) Hence we see how “cunning, perfidious”
and “clever” was the attitude of this open atheist to the world in
directly attacking its religion, while the Stoics adapted the ancient
religion in their own speculative fashion, and the Sceptics used their
concept of “appearance” as the excuse for being able to accompany
all their judgments with a reservatio mentalis.

Thus, according to Stirner, the Stoics finally arrive at “contempt
for the world” (p. 30), the Epicureans at “the same worldly wisdom
as the Stoics” (p. 32), and the Sceptics at the point where they “let the
world alone and do not worry about it at all”. Hence, according to
Stirner, all three end in an attitude of indifference to the world, of
“contempt for the world” (p. 485). Long before him, Hegel
expressed it in this way: Stoicism, Scepticism, Epicureanism “aimed
at making the mind indifferent towards everything that actuality has
to offer” ( Philosophie der Geschichte,b p. 327).

“The ancients,” writes Saint Max, summing up his criticism of the ancient world of
ideas, “it is true, had ideas, but they did not know the idea ” (p. 30). In this connection,
“one should recall what was said earlier about our childhood ideas” (ibid.).

The history of ancient philosophy has to conform to Stirner’s
design. In order that the Greeks should retain their role of children,
Aristotle ought not to have lived and his thought in and for itself
(t ) vo7jatC xafLaoTTjv), his self-thinking reason (aoxov Vos To vovO

and his self-thinking intellect (t), vorjtKC vot) aewc) should never
have occurred; and in general his Metaphysics and the third book of
his Psychologyc ought not to have existed.

With just as much right as Saint Max here recalls “what was said
earlier about our childhood”, when he discussed “our childhood”
he could have said: let the reader look up what will be said below
about the ancients and the Negroes and will not be said about
Aristotle.

a See present edition, Vol. 1, p. 488. — Ed.

b G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Geschichte. — Ed.
c Aristoteles, De anima. — Ed.

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In order to appreciate the true meaning of the last ancient
philosophies during the dissolution of the ancient world, Jacques le
bonhomme had only to look at the real situation in life of their
adherents under the world dominion of Rome. He could have
found, inter alia, in Lucian a detailed description of how the people
regarded them as public buffoons, and how the Roman capitalists,
proconsuls, etc., hired them as court jesters for their entertainment,
so that after squabbling at the table with slaves for a few bones and a
crust of bread and after being given a special sour wine, they would
amuse the master of the house and his guests with delightful words
like “ataraxia”, “aphasia”,3 “hedone”, etc.*

Incidentally, if our good man wanted to make the history of
ancient philosophy into a history of antiquity, then as a matter of
course he ought to have merged the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics
in the Neo-Plat onists, whose philosophy is nothing but a fantastic
combination of the Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptical doctrine with the
content of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Instead of that, he
merges these doctrines directly in Christianity.**

It is not “Stirner” that has left Greek philosophy “behind him”,
but Greek philosophy that has “Stirner” behind it (cf. Wigand,
p. 186b). Instead of telling us how “antiquity” arrives at a world of
things and “copes” with it, this ignorant school-master causes
antiquity blissfully to vanish by means of a quotation from Timon;
whereby antiquity the more naturally “arrives at its final goal” since,
according to Saint Max, the ancients “found themselves placed by
nature” in the ancient “communality”, which, “let us say in
conclusion”, “can be understood” the more easily because this
communality, the family, etc., are dubbed “the so-called natural ties”
(p. 33). By means of nature the ancient “world of things” is created,
and by means of Timon and Pilate (p. 32) it is destroyed. Instead of
describing the “world of things” which provides the material basis of

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] ... just as after the
Revolution the French aristocrats became the dancing instructors of the whole of
Europe, and the English lords will soon find their true place in the civilised world as
stable-hands and kennel-men.

** [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] On the contrary,
Stirner should have shown us that Hellenism even after its disintegration still
continued to exist for a long time; that next to it the Romans gained world
domination, what they really did in the world, how the Roman world developed and
declined, and finally how the Hellenic and Roman world perished, spiritually in
Christianity and materially in the migration of the peoples.

a Refusal to express any definite opinion. — Ed.
b Max Stirner, “Recensenten Stirners”. — Ed.

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Christianity, he causes this “world of things” to be annihilated in the
world of the spirit, in Christianity.

The German philosophers are accustomed to counterpose antiqui-
ty, as the epoch of realism, to Christianity and modern times, as the
epoch of idealism, whereas the French and English economists,
historians and scientists are accustomed to regard antiquity as the
period of idealism in contrast to the materialism and empiricism of
modern times. In the same way antiquity can be considered to be
idealistic insofar as in history the ancients represent the “ citoyen ”, the
idealist politician, while in the final analysis the moderns turn into
the “bourgeois”, the realist ami du commerce a — or again it can be
considered to be realistic, because for the ancients the communality
was a “truth”, whereas for the moderns it is an idealist “lie”. All
these abstract counterposings and historical constructions are of very
little use.

The “unique thing” we learn from this whole portrayal of the
ancients is that, whereas Stirner “knows” very few “things” about
the ancient world, he has all the “better seen through” them (cf.
Wigand, p. 191).

Stirner is truly that same “man child” of whom it is prophesied in
the Revelation of St. John, 12:5, that he “was to rule all nations with
a rod of iron”. We have seen how he sets about the unfortunate
heathen with the iron rod of his ignorance. The “moderns” will fare
no better.

4. The Moderns

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed
away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17) (p. 33).

By means of this biblical saying the ancient world has now indeed
“passed away” or, as Saint Max really wanted to say, “all gone”,b and
with one leapc we have jumped over to the new, Christian, youthful,
Mongoloid “world of the spirit”. We shall see that this, too, will have
“all gone” in a very short space of time.

“Whereas it was stated above ‘for the ancients, the world was a truth’, we must say
here ‘for the moderns the spirit was a truth', but in neither case should we forget the
important addition; a truth, the untruth of which they sought to penetrate and,
finally, did indeed penetrate’” (p. 33).

a An expression of Fourier (see Ch. Fourier, Des trois unites extemes). — Ed.
b Here the authors ironically use the Berlin dialect words alle jeworden. — Ed.

In German a pun on the word Satz, which means a leap, a jump and also a
sentence, a proposition. — Ed.

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While we do not wish to devise any Stirner-like constructions, “we
must say here”: for the moderns truth was a spirit, namely the holy
spirit. Jacques le bonhomme again takes the moderns not in their
actual historical connection with the “world of things” — which,
despite being “all gone”, nevertheless continues to exist — but in their
theoretical, and indeed religious, attitude. For him the history of the
Middle Ages and modern times again exists only as the history of
religion and philosophy; he devoutly believes all the illusions of these
epochs and the philosophical illusions about these illusions. Thus,
having given the history of the moderns the same turn as he gave
that of the ancients, Saint Max can then easily “demonstrate” in it a
“similar course to that taken by antiquity”, and pass from the
Christian religion to modern German philosophy as rapidly as he
passed from ancient philosophy to the Christian religion. On page 37
he himself gives a characterisation of his historical illusions, by
making the discovery that “the ancients have nothing to offer but
worldly wisdom ” and that “the moderns have never gone, and do not
go, beyond theology ”, and he solemnly asks: “What did the moderns
seek to penetrate?” The ancients and moderns alike do nothing else
in history but “seek to penetrate something” — the ancients try to
find out what is behind the world of things, the moderns behind the
world of the spirit. In the end the ancients are left “without a world”
and the moderns “without a spirit”; the ancients wanted to become
idealists, the moderns to become realists (p. 485), but both of them
were only occupied with the divine (p. 488) — “history up to now” is
only the “history of the spiritual man” (what faith!) (p. 442) — in
short we have again the child and the youth, the Negro and the
Mongol, and all the rest of the terminology of the “various
transformations” .

At the same time we see a faithful imitation of the speculative
manner, by which children beget their father, and what is earlier is
brought about by what is later. From the very outset Christians must
“seek to penetrate the untruthfulness of their truth”, they must
immediately be hidden atheists and critics, as was already indicated
concerning the ancients. But not satisfied with this, Saint Max gives
one more brilliant example of his “virtuosity in” (speculative)
“thought” (p. 230):

“Now, after liberalism has acclaimed man, one can state that thereby only the last
consequence of Christianity has been drawn and that Christianity originally set itself no other
task than that of ... realising man.”

Since allegedly the last consequence of Christianity has been
drawn, “one” can state that it has been drawn. As soon as the later

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ones have transformed what was earlier “ one can state” that the
earlier ones “originally”, namely “in truth”, in essence, in heaven, as
hidden Jews, “set themselves no other task” than that of being
transformed by the later ones. Christianity, for Jacques le bonhomme,
is a self-positing subject, the absolute spirit, which “originally”
posits its end as its beginning. Cf. Hegel’s Encyclopadie, etc.

“Hence” (namely because one can attribute an imaginary task to Christianity)
“there follows the delusion” (of course, before Feuerbach it was impossible to know
what task Christianity “had originally set itself”) “that Christianity attaches infinite
value to the ego, as revealed, for example, in the theory of immortality and pastoral
work. No, it attaches this value to man alone, man alone is immortal, and only because I
am a man, am I also immortal.”

If, then, from the whole of Stirner’s scheme and formulation of
tasks it emerges, already sufficiently clearly, that Christianity can
lend immortality only to Feuerbach’s “man”, we learn here in
addition that this comes about also because Christianity does not
ascribe this immortality — to animals as well.

Let us now also draw up a scheme a la Saint Max.

“Now, after” modern large-scale landownership, which has arisen
from the process of parcellation, has actually “ proclaimed ” primogen-
iture, “ one can state that thereby only the last consequence” of the
parcellation of landed property “ has been drawn” “ and that”
parcellation “in truth originally set itself no other task than that of
realising ” primogeniture, true primogeniture. “ Hence there follows the
delusion” that parcellation “ attaches infinite value ” to equal rights of
members of the family, “as revealed, for example”, in the laws of
inheritance of the Code Napoleon. “No, it .attaches this value solely”
to the eldest son; “only” the eldest son, the future owner of the
entailed estate, will become a large landowner, “and only because I
am” the eldest son “I will also be” a large landowner.

In this way it is infinitely easv to give history “unique” turns, as
one has only to describe its very latest result as the “task” which “in
truth originally it set itself”. Thereby earlier times acquire a bizarre
and hitherto unprecedented appearance. It produces a striking
impression, and does not require great production costs. As, for
instance, if one says that the real “task” which the institution of
landed property “originally set itself” was to replace people by
sheep — a consequence which has recently become manifest in
Scotland, etc., or that the proclamation of the Capet dynasty51
“originally in truth set itself the task” of sending Louis XVI to the
guillotine and M. Guizot into the Government. The important thing
is to do it in a solemn, pious, priestly way, to draw a deep breath, and
then suddenly to burst out: “Now, at last, one can state it.”

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What Saint Max says about the moderns in the above section
(pp. 33-37) is only the prologue to the spirit history which is in store
for us. Here, too, we see how he tries “to rid himself as quickly as
possible” of empirical facts and parades before us the same
categories as in the case of the ancients — reason, heart, spirit,
etc. — only they are given different names. The Sophists become
sophistical scholastics, “humanists, Machiavellism (the art of
printing, the New World”, etc.; cf. Hegel’s Geschichte der Philosophies
III, p. 128) who represent reason; Socrates is transformed into
Luther, who extols the heart (Hegel, l.c., p. 227), and of the post-
Reformation period we learn that during that time it was a matter of
“empty cordiality” (which in the section about the ancients was called
“purity of heart”, cf. Hegel, l.c., p. 241). All this on page 34.
In this way Saint Max “proves” that “Christianity takes a course
similar to that of antiquity”. After Luther he no longer even troubles
to provide names for his categories; he hurries in seven-league boots
to modern German philosophy. Four appositions (“until nothing
remains but empty cordiality, all the universal love of mankind, love
of man, consciousness of freedom, ‘self-consciousness’”, p. 34;
Hegel, l.c., pp. 228, 229), four words fill the gulf between Luther and
Hegel and “only thus is Christianity completed”. This whole
argument is achieved in one masterly sentence, with the help of such
levers as “at last” — “and from that time” — “since one” — “also” —
“from day to day” — “until finally”, etc., a sentence which the reader
can verify for himself on the classic page 34 already mentioned.

Finally Saint Max gives us a few more examples of his faith,
showing that he is so little ashamed of the Gospel that he asserts: “We
really are nothing but spirit”, and maintains that at the end of the
ancient world “after long efforts” the “spirit” has really “rid itself of
the world”. And immediately afterwards he once more betrays the
secret of his scheme, by declaring of the Christian spirit that “ like a
youth it entertains plans for improving or saving the world”. All this
on page 36.

“So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit
upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy.... And upon her forehead
was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great ... and I saw the woman drunken with
the blood of the saints”, etc. (Revelation of St. John, 17, Verses 3, 5, 6).

The apocalyptic prophet did not prophesy accurately this time.
Now at last, after Stirner has acclaimed man, one can state that he
ought to have said: So he carried me into the wilderness of the spirit.
And I saw a man sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of blasphemy

G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen fiber die Geschichte der Philosophic. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

of names ... and upon his forehead was a name written, Mystery, the
unique ... and I saw the man drunken with the blood of holy, etc.
So we now enter the wilderness of the spirit.

A. The Spirit (Pure History of Spirits)

The first thing we learn about the “spirit” is that it is not the spirit
but “the realm, of spirits” that “is immensely large”. Saint Max has
nothing to say immediately of the spirit except that “an immensely
large realm of spirits” exists — just as all he knows of the Middle Ages
is that this period lasted for “a long time”. Having presupposed that
this “realm of spirits” exists, he subsequently proves its existence
with the help of ten theses.

1 . The spirit is not a free spirit until it is not occupied with itself alone, until it is not
“solely concerned” with its own world, the “spiritual” world (first with itself alone and
then with its own world).

2. “It is a free spirit only in a world of its own.”

3. “Only by means of a spiritual world is the spirit really spirit.”

4. “Before the spirit has created its world of spirits, it is not spirit.”

5. “Its creations make it spirit.”...

6. ’’Its creations are its world.” ...

7. “The spirit is the creator of a spiritual world.” ...

8. “The spirit exists only when it creates the spiritual.” ...

9. “Only together with the spiritual, which is its creation, is it real.”...

10. “B u t the works or offspring of the spirit are nothing but — spirits” (pp. 38-39).

In thesis 1 the “spiritual world” is again immediately presupposed
as existing, instead of being deduced, and this thesis 1 is again
preached to us in theses 2-9 in eight new transformations. At the end
of thesis 9 we find ourselves exactly where we were at the end of
thesis 1 — and then in thesis 10 a “but” suddenly introduces us to
“ spirits ”, about whom so far nothing has been said.

“Since the spirit exists only by creating the spiritual, we look around for its first
creations” (p. 41).

According to theses 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9, however, the spirit is its own
creation. This is now expressed thus, the spirit, i.e., the first creation
of the spirit,

“must arise out of nothing” ... “it must first create itself” ... “its first creation is itself,
the spirit” (ibid.). “When it has accomplished this creative act there follows from then
on a natural reproduction of creations just as, according to the myth, only the first human
beings had to be created and the rest of the human race was reproduced of itself”
(ibid.).

“However mystical this may sound, we nevertheless experience this daily. Are you
a thinking person before you think? In creating your first thought, you create yourself.

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149

the thinker, for you do not think until you think, i.e.” — i.e., — “have some thought. Is it
not your singing alone that makes you a singer, your speech that makes you a speaking
person? Well, in the same way only the creation of the spiritual makes you spirit.”

Our saintly conjurer assumes that the spirit creates the spiritual in
order to draw the conclusion that the spirit creates itself as spirit; on
the other hand, he assumes it as spirit in order to allow it to arrive at
its spiritual creations (which, “according to the myth, are reproduced
of themselves” and become spirits). So far we have the long-familiar
orthodox-Hegelian phrases. The genuinely “unique” exposition of
what Saint Max wants to say only begins with the example he gives.
That is to say, if Jacques le bonhomme cannot get any further, if even
“One” and “It” are unable to float his stranded ship, “Stirner” calls
his third serf to his assistance, the “You”, who never leaves him in the
lurch and on whom he can rely in extremity. This “You” is an
individual whom we are not encountering for the first time, a pious
and faithful servant,3 whom we have seen going through fire and
water, a worker in the vineyard of his lord, a man who does not allow
anything to terrify him, in a word he is: Szeliga.* When “Stirner” is
in the utmost plight in his exposition he cries out: Szeliga,
help! — and trusty Eckart Szeliga immediately puts his shoulder to
the wheel to get the cart out of the mire. We shall have more to say
later about Saint Max’s relation to Szeliga.

It is a question of spirit which creates itself out of nothing, hence it is
a question of nothing, which out of nothing makes itself spirit. From
this Saint Max derives the creation of Szeliga’s spirit from Szeliga.
And who else if not Szeliga could “Stirner” count on allowing
himself to be put in the place of nothing in the manner indicated
above? Who could be taken in by such a trick but Szeliga, who feels
highly flattered at being allowed to appear at all as one of the
dramatis personae ? What Saint Max had to prove was not that a given
“you”, i.e., the given Szeliga, becomes a thinker, speaker, singer
from the moment when he begins to think, speak, sing — but that the
thinker creates himself out of nothing by beginning to think, that the
singer creates himself out of nothing by beginning to sing, etc., and it is
not even the thinker and the singer, but the thought and the singing as
subjects that create themselves out of nothing by beginning to think and
to sing. For the rest, “Stirner makes only the extremely simple

* Cf. Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik, where the earlier exploits of
this man of God have already been set forth. b

3 Matthew 25:21.— Ed.

b See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 55-77. Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

reflection” and states only the “extremely popular” proposition (cf.
Wigand, p. 156) that Szeliga develops one of his qualities by
developing it. There is, of course, absolutely nothing “to be
wondered at” in the fact that Saint Max does not even “make”
correctly “such simple reflections”, but expresses them incorrectly in
order thereby to prove a still much more incorrect proposition with
the aid of the most incorrect logic in the world.

Far from it being true that “out of nothing” I make myself, for
example, a “speaker”, the nothing which forms the basis here is a
very manifold something, the real individual, his speech organs, a
definite stage of physical development, an existing language and
dialects, ears capable of hearing and a human environment from
which it is possible to hear something, etc., etc. Therefore, in the
development of a property something is created by something out of
something, and by no means comes, as in Hegel’s Logik, from
nothing, through nothing to nothing.3

Now that Saint Max has his faithful Szeliga close at hand,
everything goes forward smoothly again. We shall see how, by means
of his “you”, he again transforms the spirit into the youth, exactly as
he earlier transformed the youth into the spirit; here we shall again
find the whole history of the youth repeated almost word for word,
only with a few camouflaging alterations — just as the “immensely
large realm of spirits” mentioned on page 37 was nothing but the
“realm of the spirit”, to found and enlarge which was the “aim” of
the spirit of the youth (p. 17).

“Just as you, however, distinguish yourself from the thinker, singer, speaker, so you
distinguish yourself no less from the spirit and are well aware that you are something
else as well as spirit. However, just as in the enthusiasm of thinking it may easily happen
that sight and hearing fail the thinking ego, so the enthusiasm of the spirit has seized
you too, and you now aspire with all your might to become wholly spirit and merged in
spirit. The spirit is your ideal, something unattained, something of the beyond: spirit
means your — God, ‘God is spirit’13.... You inveigh against yourself, you who cannot get
rid of a relic of the non-spiritual. Instead of saying: I am more than spirit, you say
contritely: I am less than spirit, and I can only envisage spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit
which is nothing but spirit, but I am not it, and since I am not it, then it is an other, it exists
as an other, whom I call ‘God’.”

After previously for a long time occupying ourselves with the trick
of making something out of nothing, we now suddenly, perfectly
“naturally”, come to an individual who is something else as well as
spirit, consequently is something, and wants to become pure spirit.

3 Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Th. I, Abt. 2. — Ed.
b John 4:24. — Ed.

The German Ideoiogv. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 151

i.e., nothing. This much easier problem, i.e.. to turn something into
nothing, once again poses the whole story of the vouth, who “has ve:
to seek the pertect soiri*’ ', and one needs merely to repeat the old
phrases irom pages 17-18 to oe extricated from all difficulties.
Particulariy, when one has such an obedient and gullible servant as
Szeliga, on whom “Surne~ can impose the idea that just as “in the
enthusiasm of tiimking it mav easily' (!) “happen that sight and
nearing fail” him “Stimer”. so he, Szeliga. has also oeen “seized with
the enthusiasm of the spirit’ and he, Szeliga. is now aspiring with all
nis mignt to become spirit’ , instead oi acciuinng spirit, that is to sa\ ,
ne now has to piav the roie or the vouth as presented on page 1 6.
Szeliga beiieves it and in iear and trembling he obeys: he obevs when
Saint Max thunders at him: The spirit is vour ideal — vour God You
do this for me, vou do that for me. Nov von ‘ inveigh”, now ‘ \ on
sav”, now “vou can envisage’ , etc. When “Stirner” imposes on him
the idea that “the pure spirit is an other, for he” (Szeliga) “is noth'
then in truth, it is oniv Szeliga who is capable of believing him and
wno gabbles the entire nonsense after him. word for word. Inci
dentally, the method by which Jacques ie bonhomme makes up this
nonsense was already exhaustiveiv anaivsed when dealing with the
vouth Since vou are well aware that vou are something else as well
as a mathematician, vou aspire to become wholly a mathematician,
to become merged in mathematics, the mathematician is your ideal,
mathematician means vour — God. You sav contritelv: I am less than
a mathematician and 1 can oniv envisage the mathematician, and
since I am not him, then he is an other he exists as an other, whom
l call “God” . Someone else in Szeliga s place would say — Arago.

“Now. at Iasi afte^’ we have proved Stirner’s thesis to be a
repetition of the vouth”, “one can state’ that he “in truth originate
set himself no other task” than to identify the spirit of Christian
asceticism with spirit in general, and to identify the frivolous esprit,
for example, of the eighteenth century with Christian spiritlessness.

It follows, therefore that the necessity of spirit dwelling in the
bevonu, i.e,, being God, is not to be explained, as Stirner
asserts, “because ego and spirit are difierent names for different
things, because ego is not spirit and spirit is not ego” (p. 42). The
explanation lies in the “enthusiasm of the spirit” which is ascribed
without any grounds to Szeliga and which makes him an ascetic, i.e.,
a man who wishes to become God (pure spirit), and because he is not
able to do this posits God outside himself. But it was a matter of the
spirit having first to create itself out of nothing and then having to
create spirits out of itself. Instead of this, Szeliga now produces God
(the unique spirit that makes its appearance here) not because he,

7—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Szeliga, is the spirit, but because he is Szeliga, i.e., imperfect spirit,
unspiritual spirit, and therefore at the same time non-spirit. But
Saint Max does not say a word about how the Christian conception of
spirit as God arises, although this is now no longer such a clever feat;
he assumes the existence of this conception in order to explain it.

The history of the creation of the spirit “has in truth originally set
itself no other task” than to put Stirner’s stomach among the stars.

“Precisely because we are not the Precisely because we are not the

spirit which dwells within us, for that stomach which dwells within us, for that
very reason we had to very reason we had to

put it outside of ourselves; it was not us, and therefore we could not conceive it as
existing except outside of ourselves, beyond us, in the beyond” (p. 43).

It was a matter of the spirit having first to create itself and then
having to create something other than itself out of itself; the ques-
tion was: What is this something else? No answer is given to this ques-
tion, but after the above-mentioned “various transformations” and
twists, it becomes distorted into the following new question:

“The spirit is something other than the ego. But what is this something other?”
(p. 45).

Now, therefore, the question arises: What is the spirit other than
the ego? whereas the original question was: What is the spirit, owing
to its creation out of nothing, other than itself? With this Saint Max
jumps to the next “transformation”.

B. The Possessed ( Impure History of Spirits)

Without realising it, Saint Max has so far done no more than give
instruction in the art of spirit-seeing, by regarding the ancient and
modern world only as the “pseudo-body of a spirit”, as a spectral
phenomenon, and peeing in it only struggles of spirits. Now,
however, he consciously and ex professo gives instruction in the art of
ghost-seeing.

Instructions in the art of seeing spirits. First of all one must become
transformed into a complete fool, i.e., imagine oneself to be Szeliga,
and then say to oneself, as Saint Max does to this Szeliga: “Look
around you in the world and say for yourself whether a spirit is not
looking at you from everywhere!” If one can bring oneself to
imagine this, then the spirits will come “easily”, of themselves; in a
“flower” one sees only the “creator”, in the mountains — a^spirit of
loftiness”, in water — a “spirit of longing” or the longing of the spirit,
and one hears “millions of spirits speak through the mouths of

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153

people”. If one has achieved this level, if one can exclaim with Stir-
ner: “ Yes, ghosts are teeming in the whole world,” then “it is not
difficult to advance to the point” (p. 93) where one makes the
further exclamation: “Only in it? No, the world itself is an
apparition” (let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for
whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil,3 i.e., a logical
transition), “it is the wandering pseudo-body of a spirit, it is an
apparition.” Then cheerfully “look near at hand or into the distance,
you are surrounded by a ghostly world.... You see spirits”. If you are
an ordinary person you can be satisfied with that, but if you are
thinking of ranking yourself with Szeliga, then you can also look into
yourself and then “you should not be surprised” if, in these
circumstances and from the heights of Szeligality, you discover also
that “your spirit is a ghost haunting your body”, that you yourself
are a ghost which “awaits salvation, that is, a spirit”. Thereby you will
have arrived at the point where you are capable of seeing “spirits”
and “ghosts” in “all” people, and therewith spirit-seeing “reaches its
final goal” (pp. 46, 47).

The basis of this instruction, only much more correctly expressed,
is to be found in Hegel, inter alia, in the Geschichte der Philosophic, III,
pp. 124, 125.

Saint Max has such faith in his own instruction that as a result he
himself becomes Szeliga and asserts that

“ever since the word was made flesh, b the world is spiritualised, bewitched, a ghost”
(p- 47).

“Stirner” “sees spirits”.

Saint Max intends to give us a phenomenology of the Christian
spirit and in his usual way seizes on only one aspect. For the Christian
the world was not only spiritualised but equally ^spiritualised as,
for example, Hegel quite correctly admits in the passage mentioned,
where he brings the two aspects into relation with each other, which
Saint Max should also have done if he wanted to proceed historically.
As against the world’s despiritualisation in the Christian conscious-
ness, the ancients, “who saw gods everywhere”, can with equal
justification be regarded as the spiritualisers of the world — a con-
ception which our saintly dialectician rejects with the well-meaning
warning: “Gods, my dear modern man, are not spirits” (p. 47).
Pious Max recognises only the holy spirit as spirit.

But even if he had given us this phenomenology (which after
Hegel is moreover superfluous), he would all the same have given us

Matthew 5 : 37.— Ed.
b John 1 : 14. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

nothing. The standpoint at which people are content with such
tales about spirits is itself a religious one, because for people who
adopt it religion is a satisfactory answer, they regard religion as causa
sui a (for both “self-consciousness” and “man” are still religious)
instead of explaining it from the empirical conditions and showing
how definite relations of industry and intercourse are necessarily
connected with a definite form of society, hence, with a definite form
of state and hence with a definite form of religious consciousness. If
Stirner had looked at the real history of the Middle Ages, he could
have found why the Christian’s notion of the world took precisely
this form in the Middle Ages, and how it happened that it
subsequently passed into a different one; he could have found that
“ Christianity ” has no history whatever and that all the different forms in
which it was visualised at various times were not “self-determina-
tions” and “further developments” “of the religious spirit”, but
were brought about by wholly empirical causes in no way dependent
on any influence of the religious spirit.

Since Stirner “does not stick to the rules” (p. 45), it is possible,
before dealing in more detail with spirit-seeing, to say here and now
that the various “transformations” of Stirner’s people and their
world consist merely in the transformation of the entire history of
the world into the body of Hegei’s philosophy; into ghosts, which
only apparently are an “other being” of the thoughts of the Berlin
professor. In the Phanomenologie, the Hegelian bible, “the book”,
individuals are first of all transformed into “consciousness” [and the]
world into “object”, whereby the manifold variety of forms of life
and history is reduced to a different attitude of “consciousness” to
the “object”. This different attitude is reduced, in turn, to three
cardinal relations: 1) the relation of consciousness to the object as to
truth, or to truth as mere object (for example, sensual consciousness,
natural religion, Ionic philosophy, Catholicism, the authoritarian
state, etc.); 2) the relation of consciousness as the true to the object
(reason, spiritual religion, Socrates, Protestantism, the French
Revolution); 3) the true relation of consciousness to truth as object,
or to the object as truth (logical thinking, speculative philosophy, the
spirit as existing for the spirit). In Hegel, too, the first relation is
defined as God the Father, the second as Christ, the third as the Holy
Spirit, etc. Stirner already used these transformations when speaking
of child and youth, of ancient and modern, and he repeats them later
in regard to Catholicism and Protestantism, the Negro and the
Mongol, etc., and then accepts this series of camouflages of a thought

Its own cause. — Ed.

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The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

in all good faith as the world against which he has to assert and
maintain himself as a ‘ corporeal individual”.

Second set of instructions in spirit-seeing. How to transform the world
into the spectre of truth, and oneself into something made hoiv or
spectral. A conversation between Saint Max and his servant Szeiiga
(pp. 47, 48).

Saint Max: “You have spirit, tor you have thoughts. What are your thoughts'”
Szeiiga: “Spiritual entities.’

Saint Max: “Hence thev are not things0”

Szeiiga: “No, but thev are the spirit of things, tne important element in all tilings,
their innermost essence, their idea.”

Saint Max: “Wnat vou think is, therefore, not mereiv your thought0”

Szeiiga: “On the contrarv, it is the most real, genuineiv true thing in the world: it is
truth itself: when I but truly think, I think the truth. I can admittedlv be mistaken
about the rruth and fail to perceive it, but when I truly perceive, then the object of mv
perception is the rruth ”

Saint Max: “Thus, you endeavour all the time to perceive the truth0”

Szeiiga: ‘Tor me the truth is sacred1.... The truth I cannot abolish; in the truth :
believe, and therefore I investigate into its nature: there is nothing higher than it,
it is eternal. Tne truth is sacred, eternal, it is the hoiv, the eternal.”

Saint Max (indignantly): “But you, by allowing yourself to become filled with this
holiness, become yourself hoiv.”

Thus, when Szeiiga truly perceives some object, the object ceases
to be an object and becomes “the truth”. This is the first manu-
facture of spectres on a iarge scaie. — It is now no longer a matter
of perceiving objects, but of perceiving the truth; first he per-
ceives objects truiy, which ne defines as the truth of perception,
and he transforms this into perception of the truth. But after Szeiiga
has thus allowed truth as a spectre to be imposed on him by the
threatening saint, his stern master strikes home with a question o'
conscience, whether he is filled “all the time” with longing for the
truth whereupon the thoroughly confused Szeiiga blurts out
somewhat prematurely: “For me the truth is sacred.” Bui hr
mi mediately notices his error and tries to correct it, by shamefaced U
transforming objects no longer into the truth, out into a number oi
truths, and abstracting “the truth” as the trutn of these truths, “the
truth” which he can now no longer abolish after he has distinguished
it from truths which are capable of being abolished. Therebv it
becomes “eternal”. But not satisfied w’ith giving it predicates such as
“sacred, eternal”, he transforms it into the holy, the eternal, as
subject. Alter this, of course. Saint Max can explain to him tha

a Here and in the following passages the German word heilig and its derivatives
are used, which can mean: holy, pious, sacred, sacredness, saintly, saint, to consecrate,
etc. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

having become “filled” with this holiness, he “himself becomes holy”
and “should not be surprised” if he now “finds nothing but a
spectre” in himself. Then our saint begins a sermon:

“The holy, moreover, is not for your senses” and quite consistently appends by
means of the conjunction “and’: “never will you, as a sensuous being, discover its
traces”; that is to say, after sensuous objects are “all gone” and “the truth”, “the
sacred truth”, “the holy” has taken their place. “But” — obviously! — “for your faith or
more exactly for your spirit” (for your lack of spirit), “for it is itself som^/imgspiritual”

( per appositioneni a), “a spirit ” (again per appos.), “is spirit for the spirit’ .

Such is the art of transforming the ordinary world, “objects”, by
means of an arithmetical series of appositions, into “spirit for the
spirit”. Here we can only admire this dialectical method of
appositions — later we shall have occasion to explore it and present it
in all its classical beauty .b

The method of appositions can also be reversed — for example
here, after we have once produced “the holy”, it does not receive
further appositions, but is made the apposition of a new definition;
this is combining progression with equation. Thus, as a result of
some dialectical process “there remains the idea of another entity”
which “I should serve more than myself” ( per appos.), “which for
me should be more important than everything else” ( per appos.), “in
short — a something in which I should seek my true salvation ” (and
finally per appos. the return to the first series), and which becomes
“something ‘holy’” (p. 48). We have here two progressions which are
equated to each other and can thus provide the opportunity for a
great variety of equations. We shall deal with this later. By this
method too, “the sacred”, which hitherto we have been acquainted
with only as a purely theoretical designation of purely theoretical
relations, has acquired a new practical meaning as “something in
which I should seek my true salvation”, which makes it possible to
make the holy the opposite of the egoist. Incidentally we need hardly
mention that this entire dialogue with the sermon that follows is
nothing but another repetition of the story of the youth already met
with three or four times before.

Here, having arrived at the “egoist”, we need not stick to Stirner’s
“rules” either, because, firstly, we have to present his argument in
all its purity, free from any intervening intermezzos, and, secondly,
because in any case these intermezzi (on the analogy of “a Laza-
roni” — Wigand, p. 159, the word should be Lazzarone — Sancho
would say intermezzi’s) will occur again in other parts of the book,

a By means of an apposition. — Ed.
b See this volume, p. 274 et seq. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

157

for Stirner, far from obeying his own requirement “always to
draw back into himself”, on the contrary expresses himself again
and again. We shall only just mention that the question raised on
page 45: What is this something distinct from the “ego” that is
the spirit? is now answered to the effect that it is the holy,
i.e., that which is foreign to the “ego”, and that everything that
is foreign to the “ego” is — thanks to some unstated appositions,
appositions “in themselves” — accordingly without more ado re-
garded as spirit. Spirit, the holy, the foreign are identical ideas, on
which he declares war, in the same way almost word for word as he
did at the very outset in regard to the youth and the man. We have,
therefore, still not advanced a step further than we had on page 20.

a) The Apparition

Saint Max now begins to deal seriously with the “spirits” that are
“offspring of the spirit” (p. 39), with the ghostliness of everything
(p. 47). At any rate, he imagines so. Actually, however, he only sub-
stitutes a new name for his former conception of history according to
which people were from the outset the representatives of general
concepts. These general concepts appear here first of all in the
Negroid form as objective spirits having for people the character of
objects, and at this level are called spectres or — apparitions. The chief
spectre is, of course, “man” himself, because, according to what has
been previously said, people only exist for one another as represen-
tatives of a universal — essence, concept, the holy, the foreign,
the spirit — i.e., only as spectral persons, spectres, and because,
according to Hegel’s Phanomenologie, page 255 and elsewhere, the
spirit, insofar as for man it has the “form of thinghood”, is another
man (see below about “the man”).

Thus, we see here the skies opening and the various kinds of
spectres passing before us one after the other. Jacques le bonhomme
forgets only that he has already caused ancient and modern times to
parade before us like gigantic spectres, compared with which ail the
harmless fancies about God, etc., are sheer trifles.

Spectre No. 1: the supreme being, God (p. 53). As was to be
expected from what has preceded, Jacques le bonhomme, whose
faith moves all the mountains3 of world history, believes that “for
thousands of years people have set themselves the task ”, “have tired
themselves out struggling with the awful impossibility, the endless
Danaidean labour” — “to prove the existence of God”. We need not
waste any more words on this incredible belief.

a Of. 1 Corinthians 13 : 2. — Ed

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Spectre No. 2: essence. What our good man says about essence is
limited — apart from what has been copied out of Hegel — to
“pompous words and miserable thoughts” (p. 53). “The advance
from” essence “to” world essence “is not difficult”, and this world
essence is, of course,

Spectre No. 3: the vanity of the world. There is nothing to say about
this except that from it “easily” arises

Spec tre No. 4: good and evil beings. Something, indeed, could be
said about this but is not said — and one passes at once to the next:
Spectre No. 5: the essence and its realm. We should not be at all
surprised that we find here essence for the second time in our
honest author, for he is fully aware of his “clumsiness” ( Wigand ,
p. 166), and therefore repeats everything several times in order
not to be misunderstood. Essence is here in the first place
defined as the proprietor of a “realm” and then it is said of it
that it is “essence” (p. 54), after which it is swiftly transformed into
Spectre No. 6: “essences”. To perceive and to recognise them, and
them alone, is religion. “Their realm” (of essences) “is — a realm of
essences” (p. 54). Here there suddenly appears for no apparent
reason

Spectre No. 7: the God-Man, Christ. Of him Stirner is able to say
that he was “corpulent” . If Saint Max does not believe in Christ, he at
least believes in his “actual corpus”. According to Stirner, Christ
introduced great distress into history, and our sentimental saint
relates with tears in his eyes “how the strongest Christians have
racked their brains in order to comprehend him” — indeed,

“there has never been a spectre that caused such mental anguish, and no shaman,
spurring himself into wild frenzy and nerve-racking convulsions, can have suffered
such agony as Christians have suffered on account of this most incomprehensible
spectre”.

Saint Max sheds a sympathetic tear at the grave of the victims of
Christ and then passes on to the “horrible being”.

Spectre No. 8, man. Here our bold writer is seized with
immediate “horror” — “he is terrified of himself”, he sees in every
man a “frightful spectre”, a “sinister spectre.” in which something
“stalks” (pp. 55, 56). He feels highly uncomfortable. The split
between phenomenon and essence gives him no peace. He is like
Nabal, Abigail’s husband, of whom it is written that his essence too
was separated from his phenomenal appearance: “And there was a
man in Maon, whose possessions^ were in Carmel” . (1 Samuel 25 : 2.) But

a In German a pun on the word Wesen (essence) — in Luther’s Bible translation
Wesen is used in its old meaning: “possession”. — Ed.

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159

in the nick of time, before the “mental anguish” causes Saint Max in
desperation to put a bullet through his head, he suddenly
remembers the ancients who “took no notice of anything of the kind
in their slaves”. This leads him to

Spectre No. 9, the national spirit (p. 56), about which too Saint Max,
who can no longer be restrained, indulges in “frightful” fantasies, in
order to transform

Spectre No. 10, “ everything ”, into an apparition and, finally, where
all enumeration ends, to hurl together in the class of spectres the
“holy spirit”, truth, justice, law, the good cause (which he still cannot
forget) and half a dozen other things completely foreign to one an-
other.

Apart from this there is nothing remarkable in the whole chapter
except that Saint Max’s faith moves an historical mountain. That is to
say, he utters the opinion (p. 56):

“Only for the sake of a supreme being has anyone ever been worshipped, only as a
spectre has he been regarded as a sanctified, i.e.” (that is!) “protected and recognised
person.”

If we shift this mountain, moved by faith alone, back into its prop-
er place, then “it will read”: Only for the sake of persons who are
protected, i.e., who protect themselves, and who are privileged, i.e.,
who seize privileges for themselves, have supreme beings been
worshipped and spectres sanctified. Saint Max imagines, for
example, that in antiquity, when each people was held together by
material relations and interests, e.g., by the hostility of the various
tribes, etc., when owing to a shortage of productive forces each had
either to be a slave or to possess slaves, etc., etc., when, therefore,
belonging to a particular people was a matter of “the most natural
interest” ( Wigand , p. [162]) — that then it was only the concept peo-
ple, or “nationality” that gave birth to these interests from itself; he
imagines also that in modern times, when free competition and
world trade gave birth to hypocritical, bourgeois cosmopolitanism
and the notion of man— that here, on the contrary, the later
philosophical construction of man brought about those relations as
its “revelations” (p. 51). It is the same with religion, with the realm of
essences, which he considers the unique realm, but concerning the
essence of which he knows nothing, for otherwise he must have
known that religion as such has neither essence, nor realm. In
religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only
conceived, imagined, that confronts them as something foreign. This
again is by no means to be explained from other concepts, from
“self-consciousness” and similar nonsense, but from the entire
hitherto existing mode of production and intercourse, which is just

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

as independent of the pure concept as the invention of the self-acting
mule3 and the use of railways are independent of Hegelian
philosophy. If he wants to speak of an “essence” of religion, i.e., of a
material basis of this inessentiality ,b then he should look for it neither
in the “essence of man”, nor in the predicates of God, but in
the material world which each stage of religious development finds
in existence (cf. above Feuerbach ).c

All the “spectres” which have filed before us were concepts. These
concepts — leaving aside their real basis (which Stirner in any case
leaves aside) — understood as concepts inside consciousness, as
thoughts in people’s heads, transferred from their objectivity back
into the subject, elevated from substance into self-consciousness,
are — whimsies or fixed ideas.

Concerning the origin of Saint Max’s history of ghosts, see
Feuerbach in Anekdota II, p. 66.d where it is stated:

“Theology is belief in ghosts. Ordinary theology, however, has its ghosts in the
sensuous imagination, speculative theology has them in non-sensuous abstraction.”

And since Saint Max shares the belief of all critical speculative
philosophers of modern times that thoughts, which have become
independent, objectified thoughts — ghosts — have ruled the world
and continue to rule it, and that all history up to now was the history
of theology, nothing could be easier for him than to transform
history into a history of ghosts. Sancho’s history of ghosts, therefore,
rests on the traditional belief in ghosts of the speculative
philosophers.

b) Whimsy

“Man, there are spectres in your head!... You have a fixed idea!”
thunders Saint Max at his slave Szeliga. “Don’t think I am joking,”
he threatens him. Don’t dare to think that the solemn “Max Stirner”
is capable of joking.

The man of God is again in need of his faithful Szeliga in order to
pass from the object to the subject, from the apparition to the
whimsy.

Whimsy is the hierarchy in the single individual, the domination

3 The English term is used in the manuscript. — Ed

b In German a pun on the words Wesen — essence, substance, being — and
Unwesen — literally inessence. Unwesen can be rendered in English as disorder,
nuisance, confusion or, in a different context, monster. — Ed.
c See this volume, pp. 53-54. — Ed.

Ludwig Feuerbach, “Vorlaufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philo-
sophic”.— Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

161

of thought “in him over him”. After the world has confronted
the fantasy-making youth (of page 20) as a world of his “feverish
fantasies”, as a world of ghosts, “the offsprings of his own head”
inside his head begin to dominate him. The world of his feverish
fantasies — this is the step forward he has made— now exists as the
world of his deranged mind. Saint Max — the man who is confronted
by “the world of the moderns” in the form of the fantasy-making
youth — has necessarily to declare that “almost the whole of mankind
consists of veritable fools, inmates of a mad-house” (p. 57).

The whimsy which Saint Max discovers in the heads of people is
nothing but his own whimsy — the whimsy of the “saint” who views
the world sub specie aeternia and who takes both the hypocritical
phrases of people and their illusions for the true motives of their ac-
tions; that is why our naive, pious man confidently pronounces the
great proposition: “Almost all mankind clings to something higher”

(P- 57).

“Whimsy” is “a fixed idea”, i.e., “an idea which has subordinated
man to itself” or — as is said later in more popular form — all kinds of
absurdities which people “ have stuffed into their heads”. With the
utmost ease, Saint Max arrives at the conclusion that everything that
has subordinated people to itself — for example, the need to produce
in order to live, and the relations dependent on this — is such an
“absurdity” or “ fixed idea”. Since the child’s world is the only “world
of things”, as we learned in the myth of “a man's life”,
everything that does not exist “for the child” (at times also for the
animal) is in any case an “idea” and “easily also” a “fixed idea”. We
are still a long way from getting rid of the youth and the child.

The chapter on whimsy aims merely at establishing the existence
of the category of whimsy in the history of “man”. The actual
struggle against whimsy is waged throughout the entire “book” and
particularly in the second part. Hence a few examples of whimsy
can suffice us here.

On page 59, Jacques le bonhomme believes that

“our newspapers are full of politics, because they are in the grip of the delusion that
man was created in order to become a zoon politikon”h .

Hence, according to Jacques le bonhomme, people engage in
politics because our newspapers are full of them! If a church father
were to glance at the stock exchange reports of our newspapers, he
could not judge differently from Saint Max and would have to say:
these newspapers are full of stock exchange reports because they are

a Under the aspect of eternity (see Benedictus Spinoza, Ethica, Pars quinta). — Ed.

Political animal — thus Aristotle defines man at the beginning of De republica.
Book I. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

in the grip of the delusion that man was created in order to engage in
financial speculation. Thus, it is not the newspapers that possess
whimsies, but whimsies that possess “Stirner”.

Stirner explains the condemnation of incest and the institutions of
monogamy from “the holy”, “they are the holy”. If among the
Persians incest is not condemned, and if the institution of polygamy
occurs among the Turks, then in those places incest and polygamy
are “the holy”. It is not possible to see any difference between these
two “holies” other than that the nonsense with which the Persiahs
and Turks have “stuffed their heads” is different from that with
which the Christian Germanic peoples have stuffed their
heads. — Such is the church father s manner of “detaching himself”
from historv “in good time”. — Jacques le bonhomme has so little
inkling of the real, materialist causes for the condemnation of
polygamy and incest in certain social conditions that he considers this
condemnation to be merely the dogma of a creed and in common
with every philistine imagines that when a man is imprisoned for a
crime of this kind, it means that “moral purity” is confining him in a
“house of moral correction” (p. 60) — just as jails in general seem to
him to be houses for moral correction — in this respect he is at a lower
level than the educated bourgeois, who has a better understanding of
the matter — cf. the literature on prisons. “Stirner’s” “jails” are the
most trite illusions of the Berlin burgher which for him, however,
hardly deserve to be called a “house of moral correction”.

After Stirner, with the help of an “episodically included”
“historical reflection”, has discovered that

“a had to come to pass that the whole man with all his abilities would prove to be
religious” (p. 64) “so, too, in point of fact” “it is not surprising” — “for we are now so
thoroughly religious”— “that” the oath “of the members of the jury condemns us to death
and that bv means of the ‘official oath’ the police constable, as a good Christian, has us
put in the clink”.

When a gendarme stops him for smoking in the Tiergarten,52 the
cigar is knocked out of his mouth not bv the royal Prussian
gendarme who is paid to do so and shares in the monev from fines,
but by the “official oath”. In precisely the same way the power of the
bourgeois in the jury court becomes transformed for Stirner — owing
to the pseudo-hoiv appearance which the amis du commerce assume
here — into the power of making a vow% the power of the oath, into
the “ho/\”. “Verily, I say unto you: I have not found so great faith,
no, not in Israel.” (Matthew 8: 10.)

“For some persons a thought becomes a maxim, so that it is not the person who
possesses the maxim, but rather the latter that possesses him, and with the maxim he
again acquires a firm standpoint.” But “it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that
runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy” (Romans 9: 16).

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

163

Therefore Saint Max has on the same page to receive several
thorns in the flesh3 and must give us a number of maxims: firstly,
the maxim [to recognise] no maxims, with which goes, secondly, the
maxim not to have any firm standpoint; thirdly, the maxim
“although we should possess spirit, spirit should not possess us”; and
fourthly, the maxim that one should also be aware of one’s flesh, “for
only by being aware of his flesh is man fully aware of himself, and
only by being fully aware of himself, is he aware or rational”.

C. The Impurely Impure History of Spirits
a) Negroes and Mongols

We now go back to the beginning of the “unique” historical
scheme and nomenclature. The child becomes the Negro, the
youth — the Mongol. See “The Economy of the Old Testament”.

“The historical reflection on our Mongolhood, which I shall include episodically at
this point, I present without any claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity, but solely
because it seems to me that it can contribute to clarifying the rest” (p. 87).

Saint Max tries to “clarify” for himself his phrases about the child
and the youth by giving them world-embracing names, and he tries
to “clarify” these world-embracing names by replacing them with his
phrases about the child and the youth. “The Negroid character
represents antiquity, dependence on things ” (child); “the Mongoloid
character — the period of dependence on thoughts, the Christian
epoch” ( the youth). (Cf. “The Economy of the Old Testament”.) “The
following words are reserved for the future: I am owner of the world
of things, and I am owner of the world of thoughts ” (pp. 87, 88). This
“future” has already happened once, on page 20, in connection with
the man, and it will occur again later, beginning with page 226.

First “ historical reflection without claim to thoroughness or even to
authenticity”: Since Egypt is part of Africa where Negroes live, it
follows that “included” “in the Negro era” (p. 88) are the
“campaigns of Sesostris”, which never took place, and the “signifi-
cance of Egypt” (the significance it had also at the time of the
Ptolemies, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, Mohammed Ali, the
Eastern question, the pamphlets of Duvergier de Haurannes, etc.),
“and of North Africa in general” (and therefore of Carthage,
Hannibal’s campaign against Rome, and “easily also”, the signifi-
cance of Syracuse and Spain, the Vandals, Tertullian, the Moors, A1
Hussein Abu Ali Ben Abdallah Ibn Sina, piratical states, the French

2 Corinthians 12:7. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

in Algeria, Abd-el-Kader, Pere Enfantin53 and the four new toads of
the Charivari ) (p. 88). Consequently, Stirner clarifies the campaigns
of Sesostris, etc., by transferring them to the Negro era, and he
clarifies the Negro era by “episodically including” it as a historical
illustration of his unique thoughts “about our childhood years”.

Second “ historical reflection “To the Mongoloid era belong the
campaigns of the Huns and Mongols up to the Russians” (and
Wasserpolacken54); thus here again the campaigns of the Huns and
Mongols, together with the Russians, are “clarified” by their
inclusion in the “Mongoloid era”, and the “Mongoloid era” — by
pointing out that it is the era of the phrase “dependence on
thoughts”, which we have already encountered in connection with
the youth.

Third “ historical reflection ”:

In the Mongoloid era the “value of my ego cannot possibly be put at a high levei
because the hard, diamond of the non-ego is too high in price, because it is still too gritty
and impregnable for it to be absorbed and consumed by my ego. On the contrary,
people are simply exceptionally busv crawling about on this static world, this
substance, like parasitic animalcules on a body from whose juices they extract
nourishment, but nevertheless do not devour the body. It is the bustling activity of
noxious insects, the industriousness of Mongols. Among the Chinese indeed every thing
remains as of old, etc.... Therefore ” (because among the Chinese everything remains as
of old) “in our Mongol era every change has only been reformatory and corrective,
and not destructive, devouring or annihilating. The substance, the object remains. All
our industriousness is only the activity of ants and the jumping of fleas ... juggling on
the tightrope of the objective”, etc. (p. 88. Cf. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 1 13,
118, 119 (unsoftened substance), p. 140, etc., where China is understood as “substan-
tiality”).

We learn here, therefore, that in the true Caucasian era people
will be guided by the maxim that the earth, “substance”, the “ob-
ject”, the “static” has to be devoured, “consumed”, “annihilated”,
“absorbed”, “destroyed”, and along with the earth the solar system
that is inseparable from it. World-devouring “Stirner” has already
introduced us to the “reformatory or corrective activity” of the
Mongols as the youth’s and Christian’s “plans for the salvation and
correction of the world” on page 36. Thus we have still not advanced a
step. It is characteristic of the entire “unique” conception of history
that the highest stage of this Mongol activity earns the title of
“scientific” — from which already now the conclusion can be drawn,
which Saint Max later tells us, that the culmination of the Mongolian
heaven is the Hegelian kingdom of spirits.

Fourth “ historical reflection ”, The world on which the Mongols crawl
about is now transformed by means of a “flea jump” into the
“positive”, this into the “precept”, and, with the help of a paragraph
on page 89. the precept becomes “morality”, “Morality appears in its

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

165

first form as custom” — hence it comes forward as a person, but in a
trice it becomes transformed into a sphere:

“To act in accordance with the morals and customs of one’s country means here ”
(i.e., in the sphere of morality) "to be moral”. “Therefore” (because this occurs in the
sphere of morality as a custom) “pure, moral behaviour in the most straightforward form is
practised in ... Chinal ”

Saint Max is unfortunate in his examples. On page 1 16 in just the
same way he attributes to the North Americans the “religion of
honesty”. He regards the two most rascally nations on earth, the
patriarchal swindlers — the Chinese, and the civilised swindlers — the
Yankees, as “straightforward”, “moral” and “honest”. If he had
looked up his crib he could have found the North Americans classed
as swindlers on page 81 of the Philosophie der Geschichte and the
Chinese ditto on page 130.

“One” — that friend of the saintly worthy man — now helps him to
arrive at innovation, and from this an “and” brings him back to
custom, and thus the material is prepared for achieving a master
stroke in the

Fifth historical reflection: “There is in fact no doubt that by means of
custom man protects himself against the importunity of things, of
the world” — for example, from hunger;

“and” — as quite naturally follows from this —

“founds a world of his own” — which “Stirner” has need of now —
“in which alone he feels in his native element and at home”, — “alone” ,
after he has first by “custom” made himself “at home” in the
existing “world” —

“i.e., builds himself a heaven” — because China is called the Celestial
Empire.

“For indeed heaven has no other significance than that of being the real
homeland of man” — in this context, however, it signifies the imagined
unreality of the real homeland —

“where nothing alien any longer prevails upon him”, i.e., where what is
his own prevails upon him as something alien, and all the rest of the
old story. “Or rather”, to use Saint Bruno’s words, or “it is easily
possible”, to use Saint Max’s words, that this proposition should read
as follows:

Stirner’s proposition without claim to
thoroughness or even to authenticity

“There is in fact no doubt that by
means of custom man protects himself
against the importunity of things, of the
world, and founds a world of his own., in
which alone he feels in his native element
and at home, i.e., builds himself a heaven.

Clarified proposition

“There is in fact no doubt” that
because China is called the Celestial
Empire, because “Stirner” happens to be
speaking of China and as he is “accus-
tomed” by means of ignorance “to
protect himself against the importunity
of things, of the world, and to found a

] 60 Kan Marx and Frederick Engels

Fo- indeed ‘heaven' has no other sig- world or his own, in which alone he

nmcance than that oi being tne reai ieeis in ins native element and at

nomeland of man where nothing alier home’" — therefore he "builds himself a

anv longer prevails upon him and rules heaven’ out of the Chinese Celestial

over him no earth!' influence anv Empire. "For indeed’" the importunitv

lonsrev estranges him from himself, in of the world, of things “has no other

short, wnere earthiv dross is thrown significance than that of being the real”

aside and the struggle against the world hell oi" the unique, ‘ in which’ even -

nas come to an end, where, therefore, thing prevails upon him ana rules over

nothing is forbidden him anv more” him” as something “alien”, bur which he

sP- ^ • is able to transform into a “heaven’ bv

“estranging himself” from al! “earthiv
influences’ , historical tacvs and connec-
tions, and hence no longer thinks them
strange: “in short”, it is a sphere ‘ where
the earthiv”, the historical ‘dross is
thrown aside”, and where Stirner “does
not find’ in the ‘ end” “of the world
any more “struggle” — and thereby
everything has been said.

Sixth “ historical reflection”. On paee 90, Stirner imagines that

‘ in Cmna everytning is provided for; no matter what happens, the Chinese always knows
how he should behave, and he has no need to decide according to circumstances; no
unforeseen event will overthrow his celestial cairn .

Nor anv British bombardment either — he knew exactly “how he
should behave’7 , particularly in regard to the unfamiliar steamships
and shrapnel-bombs,5'

Saint Max extracted that from Hegel s Philosophie der Geschichte,
pages 118 and 127. to which, of course he had to add something
unique, in order to achieve his reflection as given above.

' Consequently' continues Saint Max, ‘ mankind climbs the first rung of the ladder
of education bv means of custom, and since t: imagines that bv gaining culture, it has
gained heaven, the realm oi culture or second nature it actually mounts the first rung
oi the heaveniv ladder” .p, 90;.

Consequently”, t.e., because Hegel oegins history with China
and because “the Chinese does not lose ms equanimity”, “Stirner”
transforms mankind into a person who ‘ mounts the first rung of the
ladder of culture’ and indeed does so “bv means of custom”,
because China has no other meaning for Stirner than that of being
the embodiment of “custom”. Now if is onn a question for our zealot
against the holv of transforming the “ladder” into a “heaveniv lad-
der”, since China is also called the Celestial Empire. “Since mankind
imagines” (“wherefrom” does Stirner ‘ know everything that”
mankind imagines, see Wigand, page 189) — and this ought to have
been proved by Stirner — firstly that it transforms “culture” into the
“heaven of culture”, and secondly that it transforms the “heaven of

The German ideoiogv. The Leipzig Council. 111. Saint -> •;

1 07

culture” into the ‘ culture of heaver.” — an alleged notion on the
part oi: mankind which appears on page 91 as a notion of Stirner’s
and therebv receives its correct expression) — ; so it actually mounts
the first rung of the heavenh ladder”. Since it imagines that it
mounts the first rung of the heavenh ladder — so — it mounts ir
actually ! “ Since ” the vouth” “imagines’ that he becomes pure spirit,
he does actually become such; See the ‘ vouth” and the “Christian”
on the transition from the world of things to the world of the spirit,
where the simple formula for this heavenly ladder of unique” ideas
already occurs.

Seventh historical reflection . page 90. “If Mongolism” (it follows
immediately after the heavenlv ladder, whereby “Stirner”, through
the alleged notion on the part of mankind, was abie to ascertain the
existence of a spiritual essence [ Wesen ]}, “if Mongolism has
established the existence of spiritual beings [Wesen]" (rather — if
“Stirner” has established his fancv about the spiritual essence of the
Mongols). “ then the Caucasians have fought for thousands of years
against these spiritual beings, in order to get to the bottom of them”.
(The youth, who becomes a man and tries all the time” “to
penetrate behind thoughts”, the Christian who “tries all the time”
“to explore the depths of divinity ”.') Since the Chinese have noted
the existence of God knows what spiritual beings (“Stirner” does nor
note a single one, apart from his heavenly ladder) — so for thousands
of years the Caucasians have to wrangle with ‘ these” Chinese
“spiritual beings”; moreover, two lines below Stirner puts on record
that they actually “stormed the Mongolian heaven, the tien . and
continues: “When will they destroy this heaven, when will they
finally become actual Caucasians and find themselves^"

Here we have the negative unity, already' seen earlier as man, now
appearing as the ‘actual Caucasian”, i.e., not Negroid, no:
Mongolian, but as the Caucasian Caucasian . This latter, therefore., a ,
a concept, as essence, is here separated from the actual Caucasians, is
counterposed to them as the ‘ideal of the Caucasian”, as a
vocation” in which thev should “find themselves”, as a “destiny”, a
“task”, as “the holy”, as “the hob” Caucasian, “the perfect’
Caucasian, "who indeed” is the Caucasian “in heaven — God".

“In the sedulous struggle of the Mongolian race, men had built a
heaven” — so “Stirner” believes (p. 91), forgetting that actual Mon-
gols are much more occupied with sheep than with heaven a —
when the people of the Caucasian stock, so long as they ... have

a In German a pun based on the words die Hdmmei — the '-sheep, and die
Himmei — the heavens. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

to do with heaven ... undertook the business of storming heaven.” Had
built a heaven, when ... so long as they have... [they] undertook. The
unassuming “historical reflection” is here expressed in a consecutio
temporuvrf which also does not “lay claim” to classic form “or even”
to grammatical correctness; the construction of the sentences
corresponds to the construction of history. “Stirner’s” “claims” “are
restricted to this” and “thereby achieve their final goal”.

Eighth historical reflection , which is the reflection of reflections, the
alpha and omega of the whole of Stirner’s history: Jacques le
bonhomme, as we have pointed out from the beginning, sees in all the
movement of nations that has so far taken place merely a sequence of
heavens (p. 91), which can also be expressed as follows: successive
generations of the Caucasian race up to the present day did nothing
but squabble about the concept of morality (p. 92) and “their activity
has been restricted to this” (p. 91). If they had got out of their heads
this unfortunate morality, this apparition, they would have achieved
something; as it was, they achieved nothing, absolutely nothing, and
have to allow Saint Max to set them a task as if they were schoolboys.
It is completely in accordance with his view of history that at the
end (p. 92) he conjures up speculative philosophy so that “in it this
heavenly kingdom, the kingdom of spirits and spectres, should find
its proper order” — and that in a later passage speculative philosophy
should be conceived as the “perfect kingdom of spirits”.

Why it is that for those who regard history in the Hegelian manner
the result of all preceding history was finally bound to be the
kingdom of spirits perfected and brought into order in speculative
philosophy — the solution of this secret “Stirner” could have very
simply found by recourse to Hegel himself. To arrive at this result
“the concept of spirit must be taken as the basis and then it must be
shown that history is the process of the spirit itself” ( Geschichte der
Philosophic, III, p. 91). After the “concept of spirit” has been
imposed on history as its basis, it is very easy, of course, to “show”
that it is to be discovered everywhere, and then to make this as a
process “find its proper order”.

After making everything “find its proper order”, Saint Max can
now exclaim with enthusiasm: “To desire to win freedom for the
spirit, that is Mongolism”, etc. (cf. p. 17: “To bring to light pure
thought, etc. — that is the joy of the youth”, etc.), and can declare
hypocritically: “ Hence it is obvious that Mongolism ... represents
non-sensuousness and unnaturalness”, etc. — when he ought to have
said: it is obvious that the Mongol is only the disguised youth who,

a Sequence of tenses. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

169

being the negation of the world of things, can also be called
“unnaturalness”, “non-sensuousness”, etc.

We have again reached the point where the “youth” can pass into
the “man”: “But who will transform the spirit into its nothing? He,
who by means of the spirit represented nature as the futile, the finite,
the transitory” (i.e., imagined it as such — and, according to page 16
et seq., this was done by the youth, later the Christian, then the
Mongol, then the Mongoloid Caucasian, but properly speaking only
by idealism), “he alone can also degrade the 'spirit” (namely in his
imagination) “to the same futility” (therefore the Christian, etc.? No,
exclaims “Stirner” resorting to a similar trick as on pages 19-20 in
the case of the man). “I can do it, each of you can do it who operates
and creates” (in his imagination) “as the unrestricted ego”, “in a
word, the egoist can do it” (p. 93), i.e., the man, the Caucasian
Caucasian, who therefore is the perfect Christian, the true Christian,
the holy one, the embodiment of the holy.

Before dealing with the further nomenclature, we also “should
like at this point to include an historical reflection” on the origin
of Stirner’s “historical reflection about our Mongolism”; our
reflection differs, however, from Stirner’s in that it definitely “lays
claim to thoroughness and authenticity”. His whole historical
reflection, just as that on the “ancients”, is a concoction out of Hegel.

The Negroid state is conceived as “the child” because Hegel says
on page 89 of his Philosophie der Geschichte:

“Africa is the country of the childhood of history.” “In defining the African”
(Negroid) “spirit we must entirely discard the category of universality ” (p. 90)— i.e.,
although the child or the Negro has ideas, he still does not have the idea. “Among the
Negroes consciousness has not yet reached a firm objective existence, as for example
God, law, in which man would have the perception of his essence ” ... “thanks to which,
knowledge of an absolute being is totally absent. The Negro represents natural man in
all his lack of restraint” (p. 90). “Although they must be conscious of their dependence
on the natural” (on things, as “Stirner” says), “this, however, does not lead them to
the consciousness of something higher” (p. 91).

Here we meet again all Stirner’s determinations of the child and
the Negro — dependence on things, independence of ideas and
especially of “the idea”, “the essence”, “the absolute” (holy)
“being”, etc.

He found that in Hegel the Mongols and, in particular, the
Chinese appear as the beginning of history and since for Hegel, too,
history is a history of spirits (but not in such a childish way as with
“Stirner”), it goes without saying that the Mongols brought the spirit
into history and are the original representatives of everything
“sacred”. In particular, on page 110, Hegel describes the “ Mongolian
kingdom” (of the Dalai-Lama) as the “ ecclesiasticar realm, the

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“kingdom of theocratic rule”, a “spiritual, religious kingdom” — in
contrast to the worldly empire of the Chinese. “Stirner”, of course,
has to identify China with the Mongols. In Hegel, on page 140, there
even occurs the “Mongolian principle ” from which “Stirner” derived
his “ Mongolism ”. Incidentally, if he really wanted to reduce the
Mongols to the category of “idealism”, he could have “found
established” in the Dalai-Lama system and Buddhism quite different
“spiritual beings” from his fragile “heavenly ladder”. But he did not
even have time to look properly at Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte.
The peculiarity and uniqueness of Stirner’s attitude to history
consists in the egoist being transformed into a “clumsy” copier of
Hegel.

b) Catholicism and Protestantism
(Cf. “The Economy of the Old Testament”)

What we here call Catholicism, “Stirner” calls the “Middle Ages”,
but as he confuses (as “in everything”) the pious, religious character
of the Middle Ages, the religion of the Middle Ages, with the actual,
profane Middle Ages in flesh and blood, we prefer to give the matter
its right name at once.

“The Middle Ages” were a “ lengthy period, in which people were content with the
illusion of having the truth” (they did not desire or do anything else), “without
seriously thinking about whether one must be true oneself in order to possess the
truth”. — “In the Middle Ages people ” (that is, the whole of the Middle Ages)
“mortified the flesh, in order to become capable of assimilating the holy” (p. 108).

Hegel defines the attitude to the divine in the Catholic church by
saying

“that people’s attitude to the absolute was as to something purely external”
(Christianity in the form of externality) ( Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 148, and
elsewhere). Of course, the individual has to be purified in order to assimilate the truth,
but “this also occurs in an external way, through redemptions, fasts, self-flagellations,
visits to holy places, pilgrimages” (ibid., p. 140).

“Stirner” makes this transition by saying:

“In the same way, too, as people strain their eyes in order to see a distant object ... so
they mortified the flesh, etc.”

Since in “Stirner’s” “book” the Middle Ages are identified with
Catholicism, they naturally end with Luther ( p. 108). Luther himself
is reduced to the following definition, which has already cropped up
in connection with the youth, in the conversation with Szeliga and
elsewhere:

“Man, if he wants to attain truth, must become as true as truth itself. Only he who
already has truth in faith can participate in it.”

Concerning Lutheranism, Hegel says:

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

171

“The truth of the gospel exists oniv in the true attitude to it.... The essential
attitude of the spirit exists onlv for the spirit.... Hence the attitude of the spirit to the
content is that although the content is essential, it is equally essential that the hoiy and
consecrating spirit should stand in relation to this content” ( Gesctnchte der Philosophie,
III, p. 234; “This then is the Lutheran faith — his” q.e., man's) "faith is required of
turn ami it alone can truly be taken into account'' (ibid., p. 230;. “Luther ... affirms that
the divine is divine om\ insofar as it is apprehended in this subjective spirituaiitv o:
faith” (ibid., p. 138). “The doctrine of the’ (Catholic) “church is truth as existent truth”
( Philosophie der Religion II, p. 331).

“Stirne^” continues:

“Accordingly, with Luther the knowledge arises that truth, because it is thought,
exists oniv for the thinking man and this means that with regard to his object-
thought — man must adopt a totaliv different standpoint, a pious” (per uppos.j.

‘ scientific standpoint, or that of thinking” tp. 1 10).

Apart from the repetition which “Stirner” again “includes” here,
only the transition from faith to thinking deserves attention. Hegel
makes the transition in the following way:

“But this spirit” (namely, the holy and consecrating spirit) ‘ is. secondly, essentially
also thinking spirit. Thinking a* such must also nave its development in it”, etc.
([Geschichte der Philosophie,] p. 234).

“Stirner” continues:

“7’his thought” (“that I am stoirit, spirit aione”) “pervades the historv of the
Reformation down to the present day” *p. 111,.

From the sixteenth century onwards, no other historv exists for
“Stirner” than the history of the Reformation — and the iatter only in
the interpretation in which Hegel presents it.

Saint Max has again displayed his gigantic faith. He has again
taken as literal truth all the illusions of German speculative
philosophy; indeed, he has made them still more speculative, still
more abstract. For him there exists only the history of religion and
philosophy — and this exists for him oniv through the medium of
Hegel, who with the passage of time has become the universal crib,
the reference source for all the latest German speculators about
principles and manufacturers of svstems.

Catholicism =attitude to truth as thing, child, Negro, the “an-
cient”.

Protestantism = attitude to truth in the spirit, youth, Mongol, the
“modern”.

The whole scheme was superfluous, since all this was already
present in the section on “spirit”.

As already mentioned in “The Economy of the Old Testament”, it

J G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen fiber die Philosophie der Religion. — Ed.

172

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

is now possible to make the child and the youth appear again in new
“transformations” within Protestantism, as “Stirner” actually does
on page 112, where he conceives English, empirical philosophy as
the child, in contrast to German, speculative philosophy as the youth.
Here again he copies out Hegel, who here, as elsewhere in the
“book”, frequently appears as “ one ”.

“One” — i.e., Hegel — “expelled Bacon from the realm of philosophy.” “And,
indeed, what is called English philosophy does not seem to have got any farther than
the discoveries made by so-called clear intellects such as Bacon and Hume” (p. 1 12).

Hegel expresses this as follows:

“Bacon is in fact the real leader and representative of what is called philosophy in
England and beyond which the English have by no means gone as yet” ( Geschichte der
Philosophie, III, p. 254).

The people whom “Stirner” calls “clear intellects” Hegel (ibid.,
p. 255) calls “educated men of the world” — Saint Max on one occa-
sion even transforms them into the “simplicity of childish nature”,
for the English philosophers have to represent the child. On the same
childish grounds Bacon is not allowed to have “concerned himself
with theological problems and cardinal propositions”, regardless of
what may be said in his writings (particularly De Augmentis
Scientiarum ,a Novum Organum and the Essays'3). On the other hand,
“German thought ... sees life only in cognition itself” (p. 1 12), for it is
the youth. Ecce iterum Crispinus!c

How Stirner transforms Descartes into a German philosopher, the
reader can see for himself in the “book”, p. 112.

D. Hierarchy

In the foregoing presentation Jacques le bonhomme conceives
history merely as the product of abstract thoughts — or, rather, of his
notions of abstract thoughts — as governed by these notions, which, in
the final analysis, are all resolved into the “holy”. This domination of
the “holy”, of thought, of the Hegelian absolute idea over the
empirical world he further portrays as a historical relation existing at
the present time, as the domination of the holy ones, the ideologists,
over the vulgar world — as a hierarchy. In this hierarchy, what
previously appeared consecutively exists side by side, so that one of the
two co-existing forms of development rules over the other. Thus, the

a Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum. — Ed.

Francis Bacon, The Essays or Councels. Civill and Morall. — Ed.

And there is Crispinus again — the opening words of Juvenal’s fourth satire. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

173

youth rules over the child, the Mongol over the Negro, the modern
over the ancient, the selfless egoist ( citoyen ) over the egoist in the
usual sense of the word (bourgeois), etc. — see “The Economy of the
Old Testament”. The “destruction” of the “world of things” by the
“world of the spirit” appears here as the “domination” of the “world
of thoughts” over the “world of things”. The outcome, of course, is
bound to be that the domination which the “world of thoughts”
exercises from the outset in history is at the end of the latter also
presented as the real, actually existing domination of the think-
ers— and, as we shall see, in the final analysis, as the domination of
the speculative philosophers — over the world of things, so that Saint
Max has only to fight against thoughts and ideas of the ideologists
and to overcome them, in order to make himself “possessor of the
world of things and the world of thoughts”.

“ Hierarchy is the domination of thought, the domination of the spirit. We are still
hierarchical to this day, we are under the yoke of those who rely on thoughts, and
thoughts” — who has failed to notice it long ago? — “are the holy ” (p. 97). (Stirner has
tried to safeguard himself against the reproach that in his whole book he has only been
producing “thoughts”, i.e., the “holy”, by in fact nowhere producing any thoughts in
it. Although in the Wigand periodical he ascribes to himself “virtuosity in thinking”,
i.e., according to his interpretation, virtuosity in the fabrication of the “holy” — and
this we shall concede him.) — “Hierarchy is the supreme domination of spirit” (p. 467).
— “The medieval hierarchy was only a weak hierarchy, for it was forced to allow
all kinds of profane barbarism to exist unrestricted alongside it” (“how Stirner knows
so much about what the hierarchy was forced to do”, we shall soon see), “and onlv the
Reformation steeled the power of the hierarchy” (p. 110). “Stirner” indeed thinks
that “the domination of spirits was never before so all-embracing and omnipotent” as
after the Reformation; he thinks that this domination of spirits “instead of divorcing
the religious principle from art, sta? ■■ and science, on the contrary, raised these who!! \
from actuality into the kingdom of the spirit and made them religious”.

This view of modern history merely dilates upon speculative
philosophy’s old illusion of the domination of spirit in history.
Indeed, this passage even shows how pious Jacques le bonhomme in
all good faith continually takes the world outlook derived from
Hegel, and which has become traditional for him, as the real world,
and “manoeuvres” on that basis. What may appear as “his own” and
“unique” in this passage is the conception of this domination of the
spirit as a hierarchy — and here, again, we will “include” a brief
“historical reflection” on the origin of Stirner’s “hierarchy”.

Hegel speaks of the philosophy of hierarchy in the following
“transformations” :

“We have seen in Plato’s Republic the idea that philosophers should govern; now”
(in the Catholic Middle Ages) “the time has come when it is affirmed that the spiritual
should dominate-, but the spiritual has acquired the meaning that the clerical, the clergy,
should dominate. Thus, the spiritual is made a special being, the individual”

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

( Geschichte der Philosophic, III, p. 132). — “Thereby actuality, the mundane, is forsaken by
God ... a few individual persons are holy, the others unholy” (ibid., p. 136).
“Godforsakenness” is more closely defined thus: “All these forms” (family, work,
political life, etc.) “are considered nugatory, unholy” (Philosophie der Religion, II,
p. 343). — “It is a union with worldliness which is unreconciled, worldliness which is
crude in itself” (for this Hegel elsewhere also uses the word “barbarism”; cf., for
example. Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 136) “and, being crude in itself, is
simply subjected to domination.” ( Philosophie der Religion, II, pp. 342, 343). — “This
domination” (the hierarchy of the Catholic church) “is, therefore, a domination of
passion, although it should be the domination of the spiritual” ( Geschichte der
Philosophie, III, p. 134). — “ The true domination of the spirit, however, cannot be
domination of the spirit in the sense that what opposes it should be something
subordinate” (ibid., p. 131). — “The true meaning is that the spiritual as such”
(according to “Stirner” the “holy”) “should be the determining factor, and this has
been so until our times-, thus, we see in the French Revolution” ( following in the wake of
Hegel, “Stirner” sees it) “that the abstract idea should dominate : state constitutions and
laws should be determined by it, it should constitute the bond between people, and
people should be conscious that that which they hold as valid are abstract ideas, liberty and
equality, etc.” ( Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 132). The true domination of spirit as
brought about by Protestantism, in contrast to its imperfect form in the Catholic
hierarchy, is defined further in the sense that “the earthly is made spiritual in
itself ” ( Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 185); “that the divine is realised in the sphere
of actuality” (the Catholic Godforsaken ness of actuality, therefore, ceases to exist —
Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 344); that the “contradiction” between holiness
and worldliness “is resolved in morality” ( Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 343);
that “moral institutions” (marriage, the family, the state, earning one’s livelihood,
etc.) are “ divine , holy ” ( Philosophie der Religion, II, p. .344).

Hegel expresses this true domination of spirit in two forms:

“State, government, law, property, civic order” (and, as we know from his other
works, art. science, etc., as well), “all this is the religious... emerging in the form
of the finite” (Geschichte der Philosophic, III, p. 185).

And, finally, this domination of the religious, the spiritual, etc., is
expressed as the domination of philosophy:

“Consciousness of the spiritual is now” (in the eighteenth centurv) “essentiallv the
foundation, and thereby domination has passed to philosophy” ( Philosophie der Geschichte,
p. 440).

Hegel, therefore, ascribes to the Catholic hierarchy of the Middle
Ages the intention of wanting “to be the domination of spirit” and
thereupon regards it as a restricted imperfect form of this
domination of spirit, the culmination of which he sees in Protestant-
ism and its alleged further development. However unhistorical this
may be, nevertheless, Hegel is sufficiently historically-minded not to
extend the use of the name “hierarchy” beyond the bounds of the
Middle Ages. But Saint Max knows from this same Hegel that the
later epoch is the “truth” of the preceding one; hence the epoch of
the perfect domination of spirit is the truth of that epoch in which
the domination of spirit was as yet imperfect, so that Protestantism
is the truth of hierarchy and therefore true hierarchy. Since,

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175

however, only true hierarchy deserves to be called hierarchy,
it is clear that the hierarchy of the Middle Ages had to be
“weakly”, and it is all the easier for Stirner to prove this since in the
passages given above and in hundreds of other passages from Hegel
the imperfection of the domination of spirit in the Middle Ages is
portrayed. He only needed to copy these out, the whole of his “ own ”
work consisting in substituting the word “hierarchy” for “domina-
tion of spirit”. There was no need for him even to formulate the
simple argument by means of which domination of spirit as such is
transformed by him into hierarchy, since it has become the fashion
among German theoreticians to give the name of the cause to the
effect and, for example, to put back into the category of theology
everything that has arisen out of theology and has not yet fully
attained the height of the principles of these theoreticians — e.g.,
Hegelian speculation, Straussian pantheism, etc. — a trick especially
prevalent in 1842. From the above-quoted passages it also follows
that Hegel: 1) appraises the French Revolution as a new and more
perfect phase of this domination of spirit; 2) regards philosophers
as the rulers of the world of the nineteenth century; 3) maintains
that now only abstract ideas have validity among people; 4) that he
already regards marriage, the family, the state, earning one's
livelihood, civic order, property, etc., as “divine and holy”, as the
“ religious principle ” and 5) that morality as worldly sanctity or as
sanctified worldliness is represented as the highest and ultimate
form of the domination of spirit over the world — all these things are
repeated word for word in “Stirner”.

Accordingly there is no need to say or prove anything more
concerning Stirner’s hierarchy, apart from why Saint Max copied out
Hegel — a fact, however, for the explanation of which further
material data are necessarv, and whicji, therefore, is only explicable
for those who are acquainted with the Berlin atmosphere. It is
another question how the Hegelian idea of the domination of spirit
arose, and about this see what has been said above.3

Saint Max’s adoption of Hegel’s world domination of the
philosophers and his transformation of it into a hierarchy are due to
the extremely uncritical credulity of our saint and to a “holy” or
unholy ignorance which is content with “seeing through” history
(i.e., with glancing through Hegel’s historical writings) without trou-
bling to “know” many “things” about it. In general, he was bound to
be afraid that as soon as he “learned” he would no longer be able to
“abolish and dissolve” (p. 96), and, therefore, remain stuck in the

a See this volume, pp. 59-62. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“bustling activity of noxious insects” — a sufficient reason not to
“proceed” to the “abolition and dissolution” of his own ignorance.

If, like Hegel, one designs such a system for the first time, a system
embracing the whole of history and the present-day world in all its
scope, one cannot possibly do so without comprehensive, positive
knowledge, without great energy and keen insight and without
dealing at least in some passages with empirical history. On the other
hand, if one is satisfied with exploiting an already existing pattern,
transforming it for one’s “own” purposes and demonstrating this
conception of one’s own by means of isolated examples (e.g.,
Negroes and Mongols, Catholics and Protestants, the French
Revolution, etc.) — and this is precisely what our warrior against the
holy does — then absolutely no knowledge of history is necessary.
The result of all this exploitation inevitably becomes comic; most of
all comic when a jump is made from the past into the immediate
present, examples of which we saw already in connection with
“ whims v”.a

As for the actual hierarch v of the Middle Ages, we shall merely
note here that it did not exist for the people, for the great mass of
human beings. For the great mass only feudalism existed, and
hierarchy onlv existed insofar as it was itself either feudal or
anti-feudal (within the framework of feudalism). Feudalism itself had
entirely empirical relations as its basis. Hierarchy and its struggle
against feudalism (the struggle of the ideologists of a class against the
class itself) are only the ideological expression of feudalism and of
the struggles developing within feudalism itself — which include also
the struggles of the feudally organised nations among themselves.
Hierarchy is the ideal form of feudalism; feudalism is the political
form of the medieval relations of production and intercourse.
Consequently, the struggle of feudalism against hierarchy can only
be explained by elucidating these practical material relations. This
elucidation of itself puts an end to the previous conception of history
which took the illusions of the Middle Ages on trust, in particular
those illusions which the Emperor and the Pope brought to bear in
their struggle against each other.

Since Saint Max merely reduces the Hegelian abstractions about
the Middle Ages and hierarchy to “pompous words and paltry
thoughts”, there is no need to examine in more detail the actual,
historical hierarchy.

From the above it is now clear that the trick can also be reversed
and Catholicism regarded not just as a preliminary stage, but

a See this volume, pp. 160-63. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

177

also as the negation of the real hierarchy; in which case Catholi-
cism =negation of spirit, non-spirit, sensuousness, and then
one gets the great proposition of Jacques le bonhomme — that the
Jesuits “saved us from the decay and destruction of sensuousness”
(p. 1 18). What would have happened to “us” if the “destruction’ ^f
sensuousness had come to pass, we do not learn. The whole material
movement since the sixteenth century, which did not save “us” from
the “decay” of sensuousness, but, on the contrary, developed
“sensuousness” to a much wider extent, does not exist for
“Stirner” — it is the Jesuits who brought about all that. Compare,
incidentally, Hegel’s Philosophic der Geschichte, p. 425.

By carrying over the old domination of the clerics to modern
times. Saint Max interprets modern times as “ clericalism and then
by regarding this domination of the clerics carried over to modern
times as something distinct from the old medieval clerical domina-
tion, he depicts it as domination of the ideologists, as “scholasticism” .
Thus clericalism= hierarchy as the domination of the spirit,
scholasticism = the domination of the spirit as hierarchy.

“Stirner” achieves this simple transition to clericalism — which is no
transition at all — by means of three weighty transformations.

Firstly, he “has” the “concept of clericalism” in anyone “who lives
for a great idea, for a good cause” (still the good cause!), “for a
doctrine, etc.”

Secondly, in his world of illusion Stirner “comes up against” the
“age-old illusion of a world that has not yet learned to dispense with
clericalism”, namely — “to live and create for the sake of an idea, etc.”

Thirdly, “it is the domination of the idea, i.e., clericalism”, that is:
“Robespierre, for example” (for example!), “Saint-Just, and so on”
(and so on!) “were out-and-out priests”, etc. All three transforma-
tions in which clericalism is “discovered”, “encountered” and
“called upon” (all this on p. 100), therefore, express nothing more
than what Saint Max has already repeatedly told us, namely, the
domination of spirit, of the idea, of the holy, over “life” (ibid.).

After the “domination of the idea, i.e., clericalism” has thus been
foisted upon history, Saint Max can, of course, without difficulty find
this “clericalism” again in the whole of preceding history, and thus
depict “Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on” as priests
and identify them with Innocent III and Gregory VII, and so all
uniqueness vanishes in the face of the unique. All of them, properly
speaking, are merely different names, different disguises for one
person, “clericalism”, which made all history from the beginning of
Christianity. As to how, with this sort of conception of history, “all
cats become grey”, since all historical differences are “abolished”

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

and “resolved” in the “notion of clericalism” — as to this. Saint Max
at once gives us a striking example in his “Robespierre, ror example,
Saint- just, and so on”. Here we are first given Robespierre as an
“example” of Saint-Just, and Saint-just — as an ‘ and-so-on” of
Robespierre. It is then said:

“These representatives of holy interests are confronted by a world of innumerable
'personal', earthly interests.”

Bv whom were they confronted? By the Girondists and Ther-
midorians, who (see “for example” R. Levasseur s Memoires, “and so
on”, “i.e.”, Nougaret, Histoire des prisons ; Barere; “ Deux amis de la
libei t''”1 { et du commerce} -. Montgailiard, Histoire de Prance; Madame
Roland, Appel a ta posterite; T. B. Louvet’s Memoires and even the
disgusting Essais histonques by Beaulieu, etc., etc., as well as all the
proceedings before the revolutionary tribunal, ‘ and so on”)
constantly reproached them, the real representatives ot revolution-
ary power, i.e., of the class which alone was trulv revolutionary, the
‘ innumerable” masses, for violating “sacred interests”, the constitu-
tion, ireedom, equality, the rights of man, republicanism, law, samte
proprietep “tor example” the division of powers, humanity, morality,
moderation, “and so on”. They were opposed by all the priests, who
accused them of violating all the main and secondary items of the
religious and moral catechism (see “for example” Histoire du clerge de
Prance pendant la revolution, by M. R.c, Paris, libraire catholique, 1828,
“and so on”). The historical comment ot the bourgeois that during
the regne de la terreur “Robespierre, for example, Saint-just, and so
on” cut off the heads of konnetes gens t; see the numerous writings of
the simpleton Monsieur Peltier . “for example”. La conspiration ae
Robespierre bv Montjoie ‘ and so on”) is expressed bv Saint Max in the
following transformation:

“because the revolutionary nriests and school-masters served Man, they cut the
tnroats ol mer ’

This, of course, saves Saint Max the trouble of wasting even one
“unique” little word about the actual, empirical grounds for the
cutting off of heads — grounds which were based on extremely
worldly interests, though not, of course, of the stockjobbers, but of
the “innumerable” masses. An earlier “priest”, Spinoza, already in
the seventeenth centurv had the brazen audacity to act the “strict

a Two friends of freedom i,and of commerce). — Ed.

Sacred properly. — Ed.
c HippoJvte Regnier d’Estourbet. — Ed.

Respectable people.— -Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

179

school-master” of Saint Max, by saying: “Ignorance is no argu-
ment.”3 Consequently Saint Max loathes the priest Spinoza to such
an extent that he accepts his anti-cleric, the priest Leibniz, and for all
such astonishing phenomena as the terror, “for example”, the
cutting off of heads, “and so on”, produces “sufficient grounds”,
viz., that “the ecclesiastics stuffed their heads with something of the
kind” (p. 98).

Blessed Max, who has found sufficient grounds for everything (“I
have now found the ground into which my anchor is eternally
fastened, ”b in the idea, “for example”, in the “clericalism”, “and so
on” of “Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on”, George
Sand, Proudhon, the chaste Berlin seamstress,0 etc.) — this blessed
Max “does not blame the class of the bourgeoisie for having asked its
egoism how far it should give way to the revolutionary idea as such”.
For Saint Max “the revolutionary idea” which inspired the habits
bleus 57 and honnetes gens of 1789 is the same “idea” as that of the
sansculottes of 1793, the same idea concerning which people
deliberate whether to “give way” to it — but no further “space
can be given”d to any “idea” about this point.

We now come to present-day hierarchy, to the domination of the
idea in ordinary life. The whole of the second part of “the book” is
filled with struggle against this “hierarchy”. Therefore we shall deal
with it in detail when we come to this second part. But since Saint
Max, as in the section on “whimsy”, takes delight in anticipating his
ideas here and repeats what comes later in the beginning, as he
repeats the beginning in what comes later, we are compelled already
at this point to note a few examples of his hierarchy. His method of
writing a book is the unique “egoism” which we find in the whole
book. His self-delight stands in inverse proportion to the delight
experienced by the reader.

Since the middle class demand love for their kingdom, their
regime, they want, according to Jacques le bonhomme, to “establish
the kingdom of love on earth” (p. 98). Since they demand respect for
their domination and for the conditions in which it is exercised, and
therefore want to usurp domination over respect, they demand,
according to this worthy man, the domination of respect as such, their
attitude towards respect is the same as towards the holy spirit
dwelling within them (p. 95). Jacques le bonhomme, with his faith

a Benedictus Spinoza, Ethica, Pars prima. Appendix. — Ed.

b The words are from a Protestant hymn. — Ed.

0 Marie Wilhelmine Dahnhardt. — Ed.

d In German a pun: Raum geben — to give way, to yield to, and to give space to
something. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

that can move mountains, takes as the actual, earthly basis of the
bourgeois world the distorted form in which the sanctimonious and
hypocritical ideology of the bourgeoisie voices their particular
interests as universal interests. Why this ideological delusion assumes
precisely this form for our saint, we shall see in connection with
“political liberalism”.3

Saint Max gives us a new example on page 115, speaking of the
family. He declares that, although it is very easy to become
emancipated from the domination of one’s own family, nevertheless,
“refusal of allegiance easily arouses pangs of conscience”, and so
people retain family affection, the concept of the family, and
therefore have the “holy conception of the family”, the “holy”
(p. 116).

Here again our good man perceives the domination of the holy
where entirely empirical relations dominate. The attitude of the
bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jew to the
law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in each
individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them. If the
entire bourgeoisie, in a mass and at one time, were to evade
bourgeois institutions, it would cease to be bourgeois — a conduct
which, of course, never occurs to the bourgeois and by no means
depends on their willing or running.58 The dissolute bourgeois
evades marriage and secretly commits adultery; the merchant evades
the institution of property by depriving others of property by
speculation, bankruptcy, etc.; the young bourgeois makes himself
independent of his own family, if he can by in fact abolishing the
family as far as he is concerned. But marriage, property, the family
remain untouched in theory, because they are the practical basis on
which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination, and because in
their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the
bourgeois a bourgeois, just as the constantly evaded law makes the
religious Jew a religious Jew. This attitude of the bourgeois to the
conditions of his existence acquires one of its universal forms in
bourgeois morality. One cannot speak at all of the family “as such’
Historically, the bourgeois gives the family the character of the
bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link,
and which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family,
which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to
exist. Its dirty existence has its counterpart in the holy concept of it in
official phraseology and universal hypocrisy. Where the family is
actually abolished, as with the proletariat, just the opposite of what

a See this volume, pp. 193-97. — Ed.

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181

“stirner” thinks takes place. There the concept of the family does not
exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely
real relations is certainly to be found. In the eighteenth century the
concept of the family was abolished by the philosophers, because the
actual family was already in process of dissolution at the highest
pinnacles of civilisation. The internal family bond, the separate
components constituting the concept of the family were dissolved,
for example, obedience, piety, fidelity in marriage, etc.; but the real
body of the family, the property relation, the exclusive attitude in
relation to other families, forced cohabitation — relations determined
by the existence of children, the structure of modern towns, the
formation of capital, etc. — all these were preserved, although with
numerous violations, because the existence of the family is made
necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which
exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was
impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking
way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family
was as good as legally abolished. The family continues to exist even in
the nineteenth century, only the process of its dissolution has become
more general, not on account of the concept, but because of the
higher development of industry and competition; the family still
exists although its dissolution was long ago proclaimed by French
and English socialists and this has at last penetrated also to the
German church fathers, by way of French novels.

One other example of the domination of the idea in everyday life.
Since school-masters may be told to find consolation for their scanty
pay in the holiness of the cause they serve (which could only occur in
Germany), Jacques le bonhomme actually believes that such talk is
the reason for their low salaries (p. 100). He believes that “the.holy”
in the present-day bourgeois world has an actual money value, he
believes that the meagre funds of the Prussian state (see, inter alia,
Browning on this subject3) would be so increased by the abolition of
“the holy” that every village school-master could suddenly be paid a
ministerial salary.

This is the hierarchy of nonsense.

The “keystone of the magnificent cathedral” — as the great
Michelet b puts it — of hierarchy is “sometimes” the work of “One”

a G. Browning, The domestic and financial Condition of Great Britain; preceded by a
Brief Sketch of her Foreign Policy; and of the Statistics and Politics of France, Russia, Austria
and Prussia. — Ed.

b Carl Ludwig Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland
von Kant bis Hegel. — Ed.

r\.arj Marx and Frederick Engels

1 8 .

“Ove sometime1; divides people into two classes, the educated and the uneducated.”
'One sometimes divides aoes into two classes, the taiied and the tailless.) “The former
insofar as the'- were worthv of tneir name, occupied themselves witn thoughts, with
the spirit.” Thev 4 dominated in the post-Chrisuan epoch and tor their thoughts they
demanded ... respect” The uneducated (the animal, the child, the Negro; are
‘ powerless” against thoughts and ‘ are dominated bv them. That is the meaning of
nierarchv ”

The ‘ educated’’ (the youth, the Mongol, the modern) are,
therefore, again onh occupied with “spirit”, pure thought, etc.; they
are metaphysicians by profession, in the final analysis Hegelians.
“Hence” the “uneducated” are the non-Hegehans.a Hegei was
indubitabiv ‘ the most educated” Hegelian and therefore in his case
it must “become apparent what a longing for things particularly tne
most educated man possesses”. The point is that the ' educated’ anti
uneducated” are within themselves in conflict with each other
indeed, in every man the ‘ uneducated’ is in conflict with the
“educated”. And since the greatest longing for things, i.e., for that
which belongs to the ‘ uneducated’ , becomes apparent m Hegel, ir
also becomes apparent here that “the most educated” man is at the
same time “the most uneducated’

"There” {in Hegel; ‘reality should be completer- in accordance with thought and
no concept be without realise

This should read: there the ordinary idea of reality should receive
its complete philosophical expression, while Hegei imagines, on the
contrary, that “consequently” every philosophical expression creates
the reality that is in accordance with it. Jacques ie bonhomme takes
Hegel's illusion about his own philosophy ior the genuine com of
Hegelian pfniosophv

The Hegelian philosophy, which in the form of the domination of
the Hegelians over the non-Hegelians appears as the crown of the
hierarchy, now conquers the last world empire.

" Hegel’ , svsiem was >.he supreme despotism and autocracy ot thought, the
omnipotent e and aimightiness of the spin ” t> 9 7

Here, therefore, we find ourselves in the realm of spirits of
Hegelian philosophy, which stretches from Berlin to Halle and
Tubingen, the realm of spirits whose history was written by Herr
Bavrhoffer" and lor which the great Michelet collected the
statistical uafa.

Here the authors ironically use Berlin dialect words for educated, uneducated
and most educated (Jebildete, Unjebildete, Allerjebildetste). — Ed.

Karl Theodor Bavrhoffer, Die Idee und Geschichte der Philosophie. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

183

The preparation for this realm of spirits was the French
Revolution, which “ did nothing but transform things into ideas about
things ” (p. 115; cf. above Hegel on the revolution, p.

“So people remained citizens” (in “Stirner”, this occurs earlier,
but “what Stirner says is not what he has in mind, and what he has in
mind cannot be said”, Wigand, p. 149) and “lived in reflection , they
had their eye on an object, before which” ( per appos .) “they felt
reverence and fear”. “Stirner” says in a passage on page 98: “The
road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But we say: the road to
the unique is paved with bad concluding clauses b, with appositions,
which are his “heavenly ladder” borrowed from the Chinese, and his
“rope of the objective” (p. 88) on which he makes his “flea-
jumps”. In accordance with this, for “modern philosophy or modern
times” — since the emergence of the realm of spirits modern times
are indeed nothing but modern philosophy — it is an easy matter to
“transform the existing objects into notional objects, i.e., into con-
cepts”, page 114, a work which Saint Max continues.

We have already seen our knight of the rueful countenance even
“before the mountains were brought forth”/ which he later moved
by his faith, right at the beginning of his book, galloping headlong
towards the great result of his “magnificent cathedral”. His
“donkey”, apposition, could not jump swiftly enough for him; now,
at last, on page 114, he has reached his goal and by means of a
mighty “or” has transformed modern times into modern philosophy.

Thereby ancient times (i.e., the ancient and modern, Negroid and
Mongolian but, properly speaking, only pre-Stirnerian times)
“reached their final goal”. We can now reveal why Saint Max gave
the title “Man” to the whole of the first part of his book and made
out his entire history of miracles, ghosts and knights to be the history
of “man”. The ideas and thoughts of people were, of course, ideas
and thoughts about themselves and their relationships, their
consciousness of themselves and of people in general — for it was the
consciousness not merely of a single individual but of the individual
in his interconnection with the whole of society and about the whole
of the society in which they lived. The conditions, independent of
them, in which they produced their life, the necessary forms of
intercourse connected herewith, and the personal and social
relations thereby given, had to take the form — insofar as they were

a See this volume, pp. 174-75. — Ed.

b In German a pun: Vorsatze — intentions, and Nachsatze — concluding clauses,
conclusions. — Ed.

c Psalms 90:2. — Ed.

8—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

expressed in thoughts — of ideal conditions and necessary relations,
i.e., they had to be expressed in consciousness as determina-
tions arising from the concept of man as such , from human essence,
from the nature of man, from man as such. What people were, what
their relations were, appeared in consciousness as ideas of man as
such , of his modes of existence or of his immediate conceptual
determinations. So, after the ideologists had assumed that ideas and
thoughts had dominated history up to now, that the history of these
ideas and thoughts constitutes all history up to now, after they had
imagined that real conditions had conformed to man as such and his
ideal conditions, i.e., to conceptual determinations, after they had
made the history of people’s consciousness of themselves the basis of
their actual history, after all this, nothing was easier than to call the
history of consciousness, of ideas, of the holy, of established con-
cepts— the history of “man” and to put it in the place of real history.
The only distinction between Saint Max and all his predecessors
is that he knows nothing about these concepts — even in their arbitrary
isolation from real life, whose products they were — and his trivial
creative work in his copy of Hegelian ideology is restricted to
establishing his ignorance even of what he copies. — It is already
evident from this how he can counterpose the history of the real
individual in the form of the unique to his fantasy about the history of
man.

The unique history takes place at the beginning in the Stoa in
Athens, later almost wholly in Germany, and finally at the
Kupfergraben59 in Berlin, where the despot of “modern philosophy
or modern times” set up his imperial residence. That already shows
how exclusively national and local is the matter dealt with. Instead of
world history, Saint Max gives a few and, what is more, extremely
meagre and biased comments on the history of German theology and
philosophy. If on occasion we appear to go outside Germany, it is
only in order to cause the deeds and thoughts of other peoples, e.g.,
the French Revolution, to “reach their final goal” in Germany,
namely, at the Kupfergraben. Only national-German facts are given,
they are dealt with and interpreted in a national-German manner,
and the result remains a national-German one. But even that is not
enough. The views and education of our saint are not only German,
but of a Berlin nature through and through. The role allotted to
Hegelian philosophy is that which it plays in Berlin, and Stirner
confuses Berlin with the world and world history. The “youth” is a
Berliner; the good citizens that we encounter throughout the book
are Berlin beer-drinking philistines. With such premises for the
starting-point, it is natural that the result arrived at is merely one

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185

confined within the national and local framework. “Stirner” and his
whole philosophical fraternity, among whom he is the weakest and
most ignorant member, afford a practical commentary to the valiant
lines of the valiant Hoffmann von Fallersleben:

In Germany alone, in Germany alone.

Would I for ever live.a

The local Berlin conclusion of our valiant saint — that in Hegelian
philosophy the world has “all gone” — enables him now without
much expense to arrive at a universal empire of his “own”. The
Hegelian philosophy transformed everything into thought, into the
holy, into apparition, into spirit, into spirits, into spectres. “Stirner”
will fight against them, he will conquer them in his imagination and
will erect on their dead bodies his “own”, “unique”, “corporeal”
empire, the empire of the “whole fellow”.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers o( the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”
(Ephesians 6:12).

Now “Stirner” has his “feet shod with the preparation” for waging
the fight against thoughts. He has no need first to “take the shield of
faith”, for he has never laid it down. Armed with the “helmet” of
disaster and the “sword” of spiritlessness (see ibid .b), he goes into
battle. “And it was given unto him to make war with the holy” but
not “to overcome” it. (Revelation of St. John 13:7.)

5. “ Stirner ” Delighted in His Construction

We now find ourselves again exactly where we were on page 19 in
connection with the youth, who became the man, and on page 90 in
connection with the Mongoloid Caucasian, who was transformed
into the Caucasian Caucasian and “found himself”. We are,
therefore, at the third self-finding of the mysterious individual
whose “arduous life struggle” Saint Max depicts for us. Only the
whole story is now behind us, and, in view of the extensive material
we have worked through, we must take a retrospective look at the
gigantic corpse of the ruined man.

Though on a later page, where he has long ago forgotten his
history, Saint Max asserts that “genius has long since been regarded
as the creator of new world -historic productions” (p. 214), we have

a From the poem Auf der Wanderung by Hoffmann von Fallersleben. — Ed.
b Ephesians 6 : 15, 16, 17 (paraphrased). — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

already seen that even his bitterest enemies cannot revile his history
on that score, at any rate, for in it no individuals, let alone geniuses,
make their appearance, but only ossified, crippled thoughts and
Hegelian changelings.

Repetitio est mater studiorum .a Saint Max, who expounded his whole
history of “philosophy or time” only in order to find an opportunity
for a few hurried studies of Hegel, finally repeats once again his
whole unique history. However, he does it with a turn towards
natural history, offering us important information about “unique”
natural science, the reason being that for him, whenever the “world”
has to play an important role, it immediately becomes transformed
into nature. “Unique” natural science begins at once with the
admission of its impotence. It does not examine the actual relation of
man to nature, determined bv industry and natural science, but
proclaims a fantastic relation of man to nature.

“How little can man conquer! He has to allow the sun to trace its course, the sea to
roll its waves, the mountains to tower to the sky” (p. 122).

Saint Max who, like all saints, loves miracles, but can only perform
a logical miracle, is annoyed because he cannot make the sun dance
the cancan, he grieves because he cannot still the ocean, he is
indignant because he must allow the mountains to tower to the sky.
Although on page 124 the world already becomes “prosaic” at the
end of antiquity, it is still, for our saint, highly unprosaic. For him it
still is the “sun” and not the earth that traces its course, and to his
sorrow he cannot a la Joshua command “sun, stand thou still”. b On
page 123, Stirner discovers that

at the end of the ancient world, “spirit” “again foamed and frothed over irresistib-
ly because gases ” (spirits) “developed within it and, after the mechanical impact from
outside became ineffective, chemical tensions, which stimulate in the interior, began
to come into wonderful play”.

This sentence contains the most important data of the “unique”
philosophy of nature, which on the previous page had already ar-
rived at the conclusion that for man nature is the “unconquerable”.
Earthly physics knows nothing about a mechanical impact which
becomes ineffective — unique physics alone has the merit of this
discovery. Earthly chemistry knows no “gases” which stimulate
“chemical tensions” and, what is more, “in the interior”. Gases
which enter into new combinations, into new chemical relations, do
not stimulate any “tensions”, but at most lead to a fall of tension,

* Repetition is the mother of learning. — Ed.
Joshua 10 : 12. — Ed.

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insofar as they pass mto a liquid state of aggregation and thereby
their volume decreases to something less than one-thousandth of
their former volume. If Saint Max feels “tensions” “in” his own
“interior” due to “gases”, these are highly “mechanical impacts”,
and by no means “chemical tensions”. They are produced by a
chemical transformation, determined by physiological causes, of
certain mixtures into others, whereby part of the constituents of the
former mixture becomes gaseous, therefore, occupies a larger
volume and, in the absence of space for it, causes a “mechanical
impact” or pressure towards the outside. [That] these nonexistent
“chemical tensions” “come” into extremely “wonderful play” in
Saint Max’s “interior”, namely, this time in his head, “we see" from
the role they play in “unique” natural science. Incidentally, it is to be
desired that Saint Max would no longer withhold from the profane
natural scientists what nonsense he has in mind with the crazy
expression “chemical tensions”, which moreover “stimulate in the
interior” (as though a “mechanical impact” on the stomach does not
“stimulate it in the interior” as well).

Saint Max wrote his “unique” natural science only because on this
occasion he was unable to touch on the ancients in decent fashion
without at the same time letting fall a few words about the “world of
things”, about nature.

At the end of the ancient world the ancients, we are assured here,
are all transformed into Stoics, “whom no collapse of the world”
(how many times is it supposed to have collapsed?) “could put out of
countenance” (p. 123). Thus, the ancients become Chinese, who also
“cannot be thrown down from the heavens of their tranquillity by
any unforeseen event” (or idea3) (p. 90). Indeed, Jacques le
bonhomme seriously believes that against the last of the ancients “the
mechanical impact from outside became ineffective”. How far this
corresponds to the actual situation of the Romans and Greeks at the
end of the ancient world, to their complete lack of stability and
confidence, which could hardly oppose any remnant of vis inertiae to
the “mechanical impact” — on this point compare, inter alia, Lucian.
The powerful mechanical shocks which the Roman empire received
as a result of its division among several Caesars and their wars
against one another, as a result of the colossal concentration of
property, particularly landed property, in Rome, and the decrease in
Italy’s population caused by this, and as a result of the [pressure of
the] Huns and Teutons — these shocks, in the opinion of our saintly

a In the German original a pun: Fall — event— and FAnfall, which can mean
idea, brain wave, invasion or collapse. — Kd.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

historian, “became ineffective”; only the “chemical tensions”, only
the “gases” which Christianity “stimulated in the interior” over-
threw the Roman Empire. The great earthquakes [in the West] and
in the East, and other “mechanical impacts” which buried hundreds
of thousands of people under the [ruins] of their towns and [which
by no] means left the consciousness of people unchanged, were
presumably, according to “Stirner”, also “ineffective” or were
chemical tensions. And “in fact ” (!) “ancient history ends in this, that
I have made the world my property” — which is proved by means of
the biblical saying: “All things are delivered unto me” (i.e., Christ)
“of my Father.”3 Here, therefore, I = Christ. In this connection,
Jacques le bonhomme cannot refrain from believing the Christian
that he could move mountains, etc., if he “only wanted to”. As a
Christian he proclaims himself the lord of the world, but he is this
only as a Christian ; he proclaims himself the “owner of the world”.
“Thereby egoism won its first full victory, since I elevated myself to
be the owner of the world” (p. 124). In order to rise to the level of
the perfect Christian, Sdrner’s ego had only to carry through the
struggle to become poor in spirit as well (which he succeeded in doing
even before the mountains arose). “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”5 Saint Max has reached perfection
as regards poverty of spirit and even boasts of it in his great rejoicing
before the Lord.

Saint Max, poor in spirit, believes in the fantastic gas formations of
the Christians arising from the decomposition of the ancient world.
The ancient Christian owned nothing in this world and was,
therefore, satisfied with his imaginary heavenly property and his
divine right to ownership. Instead of making the world the
possession of the people, he proclaimed himself and his ragged
fraternity to be “God’s own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). According
to “Stirner”, the Christian idea of the world is the world into which
the ancient world is actually dissolved, although this is at most [a
world] of fantasy into which the world of ancient ideas has [been
transformed] and in which the Christian [by faith] can move
mountains, can feel [all-powerful] and press forward to a position
where the “mechanical impact is ineffective”. Since for “Stirner”
people are no longer determined by the [external] world, are no
longer driven forward by the mechanical impact of the need to
produce, since, in general, the mechanical impact, and with it the
sexual act as well, has ceased to operate, it is only by a miracle that

a. Matthew 11 : 27 .— Ed.
b Matthew 5 : 3.— Ed.

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they have been able to continue to exist. Of course, for German prigs
and school-masters with a gaseous content like that of “Stirner”, it is
far easier to be satisfied with the Christian fantasy about proper-
ty— which is truly nothing but the property of Christian fan-
tasy— than to describe the transformation of the real property
relations and production relations of the ancient world.

That same primitive Christian who, in the imagination of Jacques
le bonhomme, was the owner of the ancient world, actually belonged
for the most part to the world of owners; he was a slave and could be
sold on the market. But “Stirner”, delighted in his construction,
irrepressibly continues his rejoicing.

“The first property, the first splendour has been won!” (p. 124).

In the same way, Stirner’s egoism continues to gain property and
splendour and to achieve “complete victories”. The theological
attitude of the primitive Christian to the ancient world is the perfect
prototype of all his property and all his splendour.

The following are the grounds given for this property of the
Christian:

“The world has lost its divine character ... it has become prosaic, it is my property,
which I dispose of as I (viz., the spirit) choose” (p. 124).

This means: the world has lost its divine character, therefore, it is
freed from my fantasies for my own consciousness; it has become
prosaic, consequently its relation to me is prosaic and it disposes of
me in the prosaic way it favours, by no means to please me. Apart
from the fact that “Stirner” here actually thinks that in ancient times
the prosaic world did not exist and the divine principle held sway in
the world, he even falsifies the Christian concept, which continually
bemoans its impotence in relation to the world, and itself depicts its
victory over the world in its fantasy as merely an ideal one, by
transferring it to the day of judgment. Only when a great secular
power took possession of Christianity and exploited it, whereupon,
of course, it ceased to be unworldly, could Christianity imagine itself
to be the owner of the world. Saint Max ascribes to the Christian the
same false relation to the ancient world as he ascribes to the youth
with regard to the “world of the child”; he puts the egoist in the
same relation to the world of the Christian as he puts the man to the
world of the youth.

The Christian has now nothing more to do than to become poor in
spirit as quickly as possible and perceive the world of spirit in all its
vanity — just as he did with the world of things — in order to be able to
“dispose as he chooses” of the world of spirit also, whereby he
becomes a perfect Christian, an egoist. The attitude of the Christian

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

to the ancient world serves, therefore, as the standard for the
attitude of the egoist to the modern world. The preparation for this
spiritual poverty was the content of “almost two thousand years” of
life — a life whose main epochs, of course, took place only in
Germany.

“After various transformations the holy spirit in the course of time became the absolute
idea, which again in manifold refractions split up into the various ideas of love of
mankind, civic virtue, rationality, etc.” (pp. 125, 126).

The German stay-at-home again turns the thing upside-down.
The ideas of love of mankind, etc. — coins whose impressions had
already been totally worn away, particularly owing to their great
circulation in the eighteenth century — were recast by Hegel in the
sublimate of the absolute idea, but after this remindng they were just
as little successful in retaining their value abroad as Prussian paper
money.

The consistent conclusion — which has already appeared again and
again — of Stirner’s view of history is as follows:

“Concepts should play the decisive role everywhere, concepts should regulate life,
concepts should rule. That is the religious world to which Hegel gave systematic
expression” (p. 126),

and which our good-natured philistine so much mistakes for
the real world that on the following page (p. 127) he can say:

“Now nothing but spirit rules in the world.”

Stuck fast in this world of illusion, he can (on p. 128) build first of
all an “altar” and then “erect a church” “round this altar”, a church
whose “walls” have legs for making progress and “move ever farther
forward”. “Soon this church embraces the whole earth.” He, the
unique, and Szeliga, his servant, stand outside, they “wander round
these walls, and are driven out to the very edge”. “Howling with
agonising hunger”, Saint Max calls to his servant: “One step more
and the world of the holy has conquered.” But Szeliga suddenly
“ sinks into the outermost abyss”, which lies above him — a literary
miracle! For, since the earth is a sphere, the abyss can only lie above
Szeliga as soon as the church embraces the whole earth. So he
reverses the laws of gravity, ascends backwards into heaven and
thereby reflects honour on “unique” natural science, which is all the
easier for him since, according to page 126, “the nature of the thing
and the concept of relation” are a matter of indifference to
“Stirner”, “do not guide him in his treatment or conclusion”, and
the “relationship into which” Szeliga “entered” with gravity “is itself
unique” by virtue of Szeliga’s “uniqueness”, and by no means
“depends” on the nature of gravity or on how “others”, for instance,
natural scientists, “classify it”. “Stirner” moreover objects to

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Szeliga’s “action being separated from the real” Szeliga and
“assessed according to human standards”.

Having thus arranged for decent accommodation in heaven for his
faithful servant, Saint Max passes on to the subject of his own
passion. On page 95 he discovers that even the “gallows” has the
“colour of the holy”; “people loathe coming into contact with it,
there is something uncanny, i.e., unfamiliar, strange about it”. In
order to transcend this strangeness of the gallows, he transforms it
into his own gallows, which he can only do by hanging himself on it.
The lion of Juda makes also this last sacrifice to egoism.3 The holy
Christian allows himself to be nailed to the cross, not to redeem the
cross, but to redeem people from their impiety; the unholy Christian
hangs himself on the gallows in order to redeem the gallows from
holiness or to redeem himself from the strangeness of the gallows.

“The first splendour, the first property has been won, the first
complete victory achieved!” The holy warrior has now conquered
history, he has transformed it into thoughts, pure thoughts, which
are nothing but thoughts — and at the end of time only a host of
thoughts confront him. And so Saint Max, having taken his
“gallows” on his back, just like an ass that carries a cross, and his
servant Szeliga, who was welcomed in heaven with kicks and has
returned to his master with his head hanging, set out to fight against
this host of thoughts or, rather, against the mere halo of these
thoughts. This time it is Sancho Panza, full of moral sayings, maxims
and proverbs, who takes on himself the struggle against the holy, and
Don Quixote plays the role of his pious and faithful servant. The
honest Sancho fights just as bravely as the caballero Manchegohd id in
the old days, and like him does not fail several times to mistake a
herd of Mongolian sheep for a swarm of spectres. The plump
Maritornes “in the course of time, after various transformations in
manifold refractions”, is transformed into a chaste Berlin seam-
stress/ dying of anaemia, a subject on which Saint Sancho composes
an elegy, one which causes all young graduates and Guards lieu-
tenants to remember Rabelais’ statement that the world-liberating
“soldier’s prime weapon is the flap of his trousers”. d

Sancho Panza achieves his heroic feats by perceiving the entire
opposing host of thoughts in its nullity and vanity. All his great deed

3 Gf. Revelation of John 5:5. — Ed.

h Knight of La Mancha, i.e., Don Quixote. — Ed.

c Marie Wilhelmine Dahnhardt. — Ed.

d Cf. the heading of Chapter 8, Book 3 of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. — Ed.

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is confined to mere perception which in the end leaves everything
existing as it was, changing only his conception, and that not even of
things, but of philosophical phrases about things.

Thus, after the ancients have been presented realistically as child,
Negro, Negroid Caucasians, animal, Catholics, English philosophy,
the uneducated, non-Hegelians, and the world of things, and the
moderns have been presented idealistically as youth, Mongol,
Mongoloid Caucasians, man, Protestants, German philosophy, the
educated, Hegelians, and the world of thoughts — after everything
has happened that was from time immemorial decided in the Coun-
cil of Guardians, the time has at last arrived. The negative unity of
the ancient and the modern, which has already figured as the man,
the Caucasian, the Caucasian Caucasian, the perfect Christian, in
servant’s clothing, seen “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians
13:12), can now, after the passion and death of Stirner on the gallows
and Szeliga’s ascent to heaven in full glory, return to the simplest
nomenclature and appear in the clouds of heaven endowed with
great power and majesty.3 “And so it is said”: what was previously
“One” (see “Economy of the Old Testament”) has become
“ego” — the negative unity of realism and idealism, of the world of
things and the world of spirit. Schelling calls this unity of realism and
idealism “indifference” or, rendered in the Berlin dialect, “Jleich-
jiltigkeit ; in Hegel it becomes the negative unity in which the two
moments are transcended. Saint Max who, being a proper German
speculative philosopher, is still tormented by the “unity of oppo-
sites”, is not satisfied with this; he wants this unity to be visible to him
in the form of a “corporeal individual”, in a “whole fellow”, and he
is encouraged in this by Feuerbach’s views expressed in the Anekdotah
and in the Philosophie der Zukunft. This “ego” of Stirner’s which is the
final outcome of the hitherto existing world is, therefore, not a
“corporeal individual”, but a category constructed on the Hegelian
method and supported by appositions, the further “flea-jumps” of
which we shall trace in the New Testament. Here we shall merely add
that in the final analysis this ego comes into existence because it has
the same illusions about the world of the Christian as the Christian
has about the world of things. Just as the Christian takes possession
of the world of things by “getting into his head” fantastic nonsense
about them, so the “ego”takes possession of the Christian world, the
world of thoughts, by means of a series of fantastic ideas about it.
What the Christian imagines about his own relation to the world,

a Cf. Matthew 24:30.— Ed.

b Ludwig Feuerbach, “VorlaufigeThesen zur Reformation der Philosophie” . — Ed.

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“Stirner” accepts in good faith, finds excellent, and good-naturedly
repeats after him.

“Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds ” (Epistle to
the Romans 3 : 28).

Hegel, for whom the modern world was also resolved into the
world of abstract ideas, defines the task of the modern philosopher,
in contrast to that of the ancient, as consisting in the following:
instead of, like the ancients, freeing himself from “natural
consciousness” and “purging the individual of the immediate,
sensuous method and making him into conceived and thinking
substance” (into spirit), the modern philosopher should “abolish
firm, definite, fixed ideas”. This, he adds, is accomplished by
“dialectics” ( Phanomenologie , pp. 26, 27). The difference between
“Stirner” and Hegel is that the former achieves the same thing
without the help of dialectics.

6. The Free Ones

What role “the free ones” have to play here is stated in the
economy of the Old Testament. We cannot help it that the ego,
which we had approached so closely, now recedes from us again into
the nebulous distance. It is not at all our fault that we did not pass at
once to the ego from page 20 of “the book”.

A. Political Liberalism

The key to the criticism of liberalism advanced by Saint Max and
his predecessors is the history of the German bourgeoisie. We shall
call special attention to some aspects of this history since the French
Revolution.

The state of affairs in Germany at the end of the last century is
fully reflected in Kant’s Critik der practischen Vernunft. While the
French bourgeoisie, by means of the most colossal revolution that
history has ever known, was achieving domination and conquering
the Continent of Europe, while the already politically emancipated
English bourgeoisie was revolutionising industry and subjugating
India politically, and all the rest of the world commercially, the
impotent German burghers did not get any further than “good will”.
Kant was satisfied with “good will” alone, even if it remained entirely
without result, and he transferred the realisation of this good will, the
harmony between it and the needs and impulses of individuals, to the
world beyond. Kant’s good will fully corresponds to the impotence,
depression and wretchedness of the German burghers, whose petty

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

interests were never capable of developing into the common,
national interests of a class and who were, therefore, constantly
exploited by the bourgeois of all other nations. These petty, local
interests had as their counterpart, on the one hand, the truly local
and provincial narrow-mindedness of the German burghers and, on
the other hand, their cosmopolitan swollen-headedness. In general,
from the time of the Reformation German development has borne a
completely petty-bourgeois character. The old feudal aristocracy
was, for the most part, annihilated in the peasant wars; what remain-
ed of it were either imperial petty princes who gradually achieved a
certain independence and aped the absolute monarchy on a minute,
provincial scale, or lesser landowners who partly squandered their
little bit of property at the tiny courts, and then gained their
livelihood from petty positions in the small armies and government
offices — or, finally, Junkers from the backwoods, who lived a life of
which even the most modest English squire3 or French gentilhomme de
province would have been ashamed. Agriculture was carried on by a
method which was neither parcellation nor large-scale production,
and which, despite the preservation of feudal dependence and
corvees, never drove the peasants to seek emancipation, both
because this method of farming did not allow the emergence of any
active revolutionary class and because of the absence of the
revolutionary bourgeoisie corresponding to such a peasant class.

As regards the middle class, we can only emphasise here a few
significant factors. It is significant that linen manufacture, i.e., an
industry based on the spinning wheel and the hand-loom, came to be
of some importance in Germany at the very time when in England
those cumbersome tools were already being ousted by machines.
Most characteristic of all is the position of the German middle class in
relation to Holland. Holland, the only part of the Hanseatic League60
that became commercially important, tore itself free, cut Germany
off from world trade except for two ports (Hamburg and Bremen)
and since then dominated the whole of German trade. The German
middle class was too impotent to set limits to exploitation by the
Dutch. The bourgeoisie of little Holland, with its well-developed
class interests, was more powerful than the far more numerous
German middle class with its indifference and its divided petty
interests. The fragmentation of interests was matched by the
fragmentation of political organisation, the division into small
principalities and free imperial cities. How could political concentra-
tion arise in a country which lacked all the economic conditions for it?

a Marx and Engels use the English word.— Ed.

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The impotence of each separate sphere of life (one can speak here
neither of estates nor of classes, but at most of former estates and
classes not yet born) did not allow any one of them to gain exclusive
domination. The inevitable consequence was that during the epoch
of absolute monarchy, which assumed here its most stunted,
semi-patriarchal form, the special sphere which, owing to division of
labour, was responsible for the administration of public interests
acquired an abnormal independence, which became still greater in
the bureaucracy of modern times. Thus, the state built itself up into
an apparently independent force, and this position, which in other
countries was only transitory — a transition stage— it has maintained
in Germany until the present day. This position of the state explains
both the conscientiousness of the civil servant, which is found
nowhere else, and all the illusions about the state which are current
in Germany, as well as the apparent independence of German
theoreticians in relation to the middle class — the seeming contradic-
tion between the form in which these theoreticians express the
interests of the middle class and these interests themselves.

The characteristic form which French liberalism, based on real
class interests, assumed in Germany we find again in Kant. Neither
he, nor the German middle class, whose whitewashing spokesman he
was, noticed that these theoretical ideas of the bourgeoisie had as
their basis material interests and a will that was conditioned and
determined by the material relations of production. Kant, there-
fore, separated this theoretical expression from the interests which it
expressed; he made the materially motivated determinations of the
will of the French bourgeois into pure self-determinations of “ free
will ”, of the will in and for itself, of the human will, and so converted
it into purely ideological conceptual determinations and moral
postulates. Hence the German petty bourgeois recoiled in horror
from the practice of this energetic bourgeois liberalism as soon as this
practice showed itself, both in the Reign of Terror and in shameless
bourgeois profit-making.

Under the rule of Napoleon, the German middle class pushed its
petty trade and its great illusions still further. As regards the
petty-trading spirit which predominated in Germany at that time,
Saint Sancho can, inter alia, compare Jean Paul, to mention only
works of fiction, since they are the only source open to him. The
German citizens, who railed against Napoleon for compelling them
to drink chicory61 and for disturbing their peace with military
billeting and recruiting of conscripts, reserved all their moral
indignation for Napoleon and all their admiration for England; yet
Napoleon rendered them the greatest services by cleaning out

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Germany’s Augean stables and establishing civilised means of
communication, whereas the English only waited for the opportunity
to exploit them a tort et a traverse In the same petty-bourgeois spirit
the German princes imagined they were fighting for the principle of
legitimism and against revolution, whereas they were only the paid
mercenaries of the English bourgeoisie. In the atmosphere of these
universal illusions it was quite in the order of things that the estates
privileged to cherish illusions — ideologists, school-masters, students,
members of the Tugendbund ’2 — should talk big and give a suitable
highflown expression to the universal mood of fantasy and
indifference.

The political forms corresponding to a developed bourgeoisie
were passed on to the Germans from outside by the July
revolution6 — as we mention only a few main points we omit the
intermediary period. Since German economic relations had by no
means reached the stage of development to which these political
forms corresponded, the middle class accepted them merely as
abstract ideas, principles valid in and for themselves, pious wishes
and phrases, Kantian self-determinations of the will and of human
beings as they ought to be. Consequently their attitude to these forms
was far more moral and disinterested than that of other nations, i.e.,
they exhibited a highly peculiar narrow-mindedness and remained
unsuccessful in all their endeavours.

Finally the ever more powerful foreign competition and world
intercourse — from which it became less and less possible for
Germany to stand aside — compelled the diverse local interests in
Germany to adopt some sort of common attitude. Particularly since
1840, the German middle class began to think about safeguarding
these common interests; its attitude became national and liberal and
it demanded protective tariffs and constitutions. Thus it has now got
almost as far as the French bourgeoisie in 1789.

If, like the Berlin ideologists, one judges liberalism and the state
within the framework of local German impressions, or limits oneself
merely to criticism of German-bourgeois illusions about liberalism,
instead of seeing the correlation of liberalism with the real interests
from which it originated and without which it cannot really
exist — then, of course, one arrives at the most banal conclusions.
This German liberalism, in the form in which it expressed itself up to
the most recent period, is, as we have seen, even in its popular form,
empty enthusiasm, ideological reflections about real liberalism. How
easy it is, therefore, to transform its content wholly into philosophy,

At random, recklessly. — Ed.
1830— Ed.

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into pure conceptual determinations, into “rational cognition”!
Hence if one is so unfortunate as to know even this bourgeoisified
liberalism only in the sublimated form given it by Hegel and the
school-masters who depend on him, then one will arrive at
conclusions belonging exclusively to the sphere of the holy. Sancho
will provide us with a pitiful example of this.

“Recently” in active circles “so much has been said” about the rule
of the bourgeois, “that it is not surprising that news of it”, if only
through the medium of L. Blanc (translated by the Berliner Buhl),a
etc., “has even penetrated to Berlin” and there attracted the
attention of easy-going school-masters ( Wigand , p. 190). It cannot,
however, be said that “Stirner” in his method of appropriating
current ideas has “adopted a particularly fruitful and profitable
style” ( Wigand , ibid.) — as was already evident from his exploitation
of Hegel and will now be further exemplified.

It has not escaped our school-master that in recent times the
liberals have been identified with the bourgeois. Since Saint Max
identifies the bourgeois with the good burghers, with the petty
German burghers, he does not grasp what has been transmitted to
him as it is in fact and as it is expressed by all competent
authors — viz., that the liberal phrases are the idealistic expression of
the real interests of the bourgeoisie — but, on the contrary, as
meaning that the final goal of the bourgeois is to become a perfect
liberal, a citizen of the state. For Saint Max the bourgeois is not the
truth of the ciioyen, but the citoyen the truth of the bourgeois. This
conception, which is as holy as it is German, goes to such lengths that,
on page 130, “the middle class” (it should read: the domination of
the bourgeoisie) is transformed into a “thought, nothing but a
thought” and “the state” comes forward as the “true man”, who in
the “Rights of Man” confers the rights of “Man”, the true
solemnisation on each individual bourgeois. And all this occurs after
the illusions about the state and the rights of man had already been
adequately exposed in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher* a fact

* In the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher this was done, in view of the context, only
in relation to the rights of man proclaimed by the French Revolution. [Cf. Karl Marx,
“Zur Judenfrage” (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 161-65). — Ed.] Incidentally, this
whole conception of competition as “the rights of man” can already be found among
representatives of the bourgeoisie a century earlier (John Hampden, Petty,
Boisguillebert, Child, etc.). On the relation of the theoretical liberals to the bourgeois
compare what has been said [above] on the relation of the ideologists of a class to the
class itself. [See p. 176 of this volume. — Ed.]

a The reference is to Louis Blanc, Histoire de dix ans 1830-1840, which appeared in
Berlin in 1844-45 in Ludwig Buhl’s translation under the title Geschichte der zehn
Jahre. — Ed.

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which Saint Max notices at last in his “Apologetical Commentary”
anno 1845. Hence he can transform the bourgeois — having sepa-
rated the bourgeois as a liberal from the empirical bourgeois — into a
holy liberal, just as he transforms the state into the “holy”, and the
relation of the bourgeois to the modern state into a holy relation, into
a cult (p. 131) — and with this, in effect, he concludes his criticism of
political liberalism. He has transformed it into the “holy”.*

We wish to give here a few examples of how Saint Max embellishes
this property of his with historical arabesques. For this purpose he
uses the French Revolution, concerning which a small contract to
supply him with a few data has been negotiated by his historv-broker,
Saint Bruno.

On the basis of a few words from Bailly, obtained moreover
through the intermediary of Saint Bruno’s Denkwiirdigkeiten ,a the
statement is made that through the convening of the States General
“those who hitherto were subjects arrive at the consciousness that
they are proprietors” (p. 132). On the contrary, mon bravel By the
convening of the States General, those who hitherto were propri-
etors show their consciousness of being no longer subjects — a con-
sciousness which was long ago arrived at, for example in the Physio-
crats, and — in polemical form against the bourgeoisie — in Linguet
(' Theorie des lots civiles, 1767), Mercier, Mably, and, in general, in the
writings against the Physiocrats. This meaning was also immediately
understood at the beginning of the revolution — for example by
Brissot, Fauchet, Marat, in the Cercle social63 and by all the democrat-
ic opponents of Lafayette. If Saint Max had understood the matter
as it took place independently of his history-broker, he would not
have been surprised that “Bailly ’s words certainly sound [as if each
man were now a proprietor...” and that the bourgeois ... express...
the rule of the proprietors ... that now the proprietors have become
the bourgeoisie par excellence.]64

[...] “As early as July 8 the statement of the Bishop of Autunb and Barere
[destroyed] the illusion that [each man], the individual, was of importance in the
legislature; it [showed] the utter impotence of the constituents. The majority of the
deputies has become master.” JStirner, op. cit., p. 132 f.j

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] For him thereby
criticism as a whole “achieves its final goal” and all cats turn grey, thereby he also
admits his ignorance of the real basis and the real content of the rule of the
bourgeoisie.

a A reference to Edgar Bauer’s essay “Bailly und die ersten Tage der
Franzbsischen Revolution” in Denkwiirdigkeiten zur Geschichte der neueren Zeit seit der
Revolution, by Bruno and Edgar Bauer. — Ed.

I.e., Talleyrand, who was Bishop of Autun from 1788 to 1791. — Ed.

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The “ statement of the Bishop of Autun and Barere” is a motion
tabled by the former on July 4 (not 8), with which Barere had
nothing to do except that together with many others he supported it
on July 8. It was carried on July 9, hence it is not at all clear why Saint
Max speaks of “July 8”. This motion by no means “destroyed” “the
illusion that each man, the individual, was of importance”, etc.; but it
destroyed the binding force of the Cahiers given to the deputies, that
is, the influence and the “importance”, not of “each man, the
individual”, but of the feudal 177 bailliages and 431 divisions des
ordres. By carrying the motion, the Assembly discarded the
characteristic features of the old, feudal Etats generaux.65 Moreover, it
was at that time by no means a question of the correct theory of
popular representation, but of highly practical, essential problems.
Broglie’s army held Paris at bay and drew nearer every day; the
capital was in a state of utmost agitation; hardly a fortnight had
passed since the jeu de paume and the lit de justice,66 the court was
plotting with the bulk of the aristocracy and the clergy against the
National Assembly; lastly, owing to the still existing feudal provincial
tariff barriers, and as a result of the feudal agrarian system as a
whole, most of the provinces were in the grip of famine and there
was a great scarcity of money. At that moment it was a question of an
assemblee essentiellement active, as Talleyrand himself put it, while the
Cahiers of [the] aristocratic and other reactionary groups provided
the court with an opportunity to declare [the] decision of the Assem-
bly [void by referring] to the wishes of the constituents. The Assem-
bly proclaimed its independence by carrying Talleyrand’s motion
and seized the power it required, which in the political sphere could,
of course, only be done within the framework of political form and
by making use of the existing theories of Rousseau, etc. (Cf. Le point
du jour, par Barere de Vieuzac, 1789, Nos. 15 and 17.) The National
Assembly had to take this step because it was being urged forward by
the immense mass of the people that stood behind it. By so doing,
therefore, it did not at all transform itself into an “utterly egoistical
chamber, completely cut off from the umbilical cord and ruthless”
[p. 147]; on the contrary it actually transformed itself thereby into
the true organ of the vast majority of Frenchmen, who would
otherwise have crushed it, as they later crushed “utterly egoistical”
deputies who “completely cut themselves off from the umbilical
cord”. But Saint Max, with the help of his history -broker, sees here
merely the solution of a theoretical question; he takes the
Constituent Assembly, six days before the storming of the Bastille,
for a council of church fathers debating a point of dogma! The
question regarding the “importance of each man, the individual”.

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can, moreover, only arise in a democratically elected representative
body, and during the revolution it only came up for discussion in the
Convention, and for as empirical reasons as earlier the question of
the Cahiers. A problem which the Constituent Assembly decided also
theoretically was the distinction between the representative body of a
ruling class and that of the ruling estates; and this political rule of the
bourgeois class was determined by each individual’s position, since it
was determined by the relations of production prevailing at the time.
The representative system is a very specific product of modern
bourgeois society which is as inseparable from the latter as is the
isolated individual of modern times.

Just as here Saint Max takes the 177 bailliages and 431 divisions des
ordres for “individuals”, so he later sees in the absolute monarch and
his car tel est notre plaisir a the rule of the “individual” as against the
constitutional monarch, the “rule of the apparition [”] (p. 141), and
in the aristocrat and the guild-member he again sees the “individu-
al” in contrast to the citizen (p. 137).

“The Revolution was not directed against reality, but against this reality, against
this definite existence ” (p. 145).

Hence, not against the really existing system of landownership, of
taxes, of customs duties which hampered commerce at every turn,
and the [...]

[...b “Stirner” thinks] it makes no difference [“to ‘the good
burghers’ who defends them] and their principles, whether an
absolute or a constitutional king, a republic, etc. — For the “good
burghers” who quietly drink their beer in a Berlin beer-cellar this
undoubtedly “makes no difference”; but for the historical bourgeois
it is by no means a matter of indifference. The “good burgher”
“Stirner” here again imagines — as he does throughout this sec-
tion— that the French, American and English bourgeois are good
Berlin beer-drinking philistines. If one translates the sentence above
from the language of political illusion into plain language, it means:
“it makes no difference” to the bourgeoisie whether it rules
unrestrictedly or whether its political and economic power is
counterbalanced by other classes. Saint Max believes that an absolute
king, or someone else, could defend the bourgeoisie just as
successfully as it defends itself. And even “its principles”, which
consist in subordinating state power to “ chacun pour soi, chacun chez

For this is our will — the concluding words of royal edicts. — Ed.
b A gap in the manuscript. — Ed.

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201

soi”a and exploiting it for that purpose — an “absolute monarch” is
supposed to be able to do that! Let Saint Max name any country with
developed trade and industry and strong competition where the
bourgeoisie entrusts its defence to an “absolute monarch”.

After this transformation of the historical bourgeois into German
philistines devoid of history, “Stirner”, of course, does not need to
know any other bourgeois than “comfortable burghers and loyal
officials’^!!) — two spectres who only dare to show themselves on
“holy” German soil — and can lump together the whole class as
“obedient servants” (p. 138). Let him just take a look at these
obedient servants on the stock exchanges of London, Manchester,
New York and Paris. Since Saint Max is well under way, he can now
go the whole hogb and, believing one of the narrow-minded
theoreticians of the Einundzwanzig Bogen who says that “liberalism is
rational cognition applied to our existing conditions”0, can declare
that the “liberals are fighters for reason”. It is evident from these [...]
phrases how little the Germans have recovered [from] their original
illusions about liberalism. Abraham “against hope believed in hope”
... and his faith “was imputed to him for righteousness” (Romans
4: 18 and 22).

“The state pays well, so that its good citizens can without danger pay poorly; it
provides itself by means of good payment with servants from whom it forms a
force — the police — for the protection of good citizens and the good citizens willingly
pay high taxes to the state in order to pay so much lower amounts to their workers”
(p. 152).

This should read: the bourgeois pay their state well and make the
nation pay for it so that without risk thev should be able to pay
poorly; by good payment they ensure that the state servants are a
force available for their protection — the police; they willingly pay,
and force the nation to pay high taxes so as to be able without dan-
ger to shift the sums they pay on to the workers as a levy (as a
deduction from wages). “Stirner” here makes the new economic
discovery that wages are a levy, a tax, paid by the bourgeois to the
proletarian; whereas the other, mundane economists regard taxes as
a tribute which the proletarian pays to the bourgeois.

Our holy church father now passes from the holy middle class to
the Stirnerian “unique” proletariat (p. 148). The latter consists of

a Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost. — Ed.
h The words “the whole hog” are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.
c From the article “Preussen seit der Einsetzung Arndt’s bis zur Absetzung
Bauer's” published anonymously in the Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz. — Ed.

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“rogues, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and murderers, gamblers,
propertyless people with no occupation and frivolous individuals”
(ibid.)- They form the “dangerous proletariat” and for a moment are
reduced by “Stirner” to “individual shouters”, and then, finally, to
“vagabonds”, who find their perfect expression in the “spiritual
vagabonds” who do not “keep within the bounds of a moderate way
of thinking.”...

“So wide a meaning has the so-called proletariat or” ( per appos.) “pauperism”!
(p. 149).

On page 151 [“on the other hand,] the state sucks the life-blood”
of the proletariat. Hence the entire proletariat consists of ruined
bourgeois and ruined proletarians, of a collection of ragamuffins,
who have existed in every epoch and whose existence on a mass scale
after the decline of the Middle Ages preceded the mass formation of
the ordinary proletariat, as Saint Max can ascertain by a perusal of
English and French legislation and literature. Our saint has exactly
the same notion of the proletariat as the “good comfortable
burghers” and, particularly, the “loyal officials”. He is consistent also

in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is
the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which
the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the
pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose
whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper. Compare
Sismondi,3 Wade,b etc. “Stirner” and his fraternity, for example, can
in the eyes of the proletarians, in certain circumstances count as
paupers but never as proletarians.

Such are Saint Max’s “own” ideas about the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. But since with these imaginations about liberalism, good
burghers and vagabonds he, of course, gets nowhere, he finds
himself compelled in order to make the transition to communism to
bring in the actual, ordinary bourgeois and proletarians insofar as he
knows about them from hearsay. This occurs on pages 151 and 152,
where the lumpen-proletariat becomes transformed into “workers”,
into ordinary proletarians, while the bourgeois “in course
of time” undergoes “occasionally” a series of “various transfor-
mations” and “manifold refractions”. In one line we read: “ The
propertied rule ”, i.e., the profane bourgeois; six lines later we read:
“The citizen is what he is by the grace of the state”, i.e., the
holy bourgeois; yet another six lines later: “The state is the status
of the middle class”, i.e., the profane bourgeois; this is then ex-

3 Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’economie politique. — Ed.
John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 203

plained by saying that “the state gives the propertied” “their prop-
erty in feudal possession” and that the “money and property” of
the “capitalists”, i.e., the holy bourgeois, is such “state property”
transferred by the state to “feudal possession”. Finally, this
omnipotent state is again transformed into the “state of the
propertied”, i.e., of the profane bourgeois, which is in accord
with a later passage: “Owing to the revolution the bourgeoisie
became omnipotent ” (p. 156). Even Saint Max would never have
been able to achieve these “heart-rending” and “horrible” con-
tradictions— at any rate, he would never have dared to promul-
gate them — had he not had the assistance of the German word
“Burger” [citizen], which he can interpret at will as “citoyen” or as
“ bourgeois ” or as the German “good burgher”.

Before going further, we must take note of two more great
politico-economic discoveries which our simpleton “brings into
being” “in the depths of his heart” and which have in common with
the “joy of youth” of page 17 the feature of being also “pure
thoughts”.

On page 1 50 all the evil of the existing social relations is reduced to
the fact that “burghers and workers believe in the ‘truth’ of money”.
Jacques le bonhomme imagines that it is in the power of the
“burghers” and “workers”, who are scattered among all civilised
states of the world, suddenly, one fine day, to put on record their
“disbelief” in the “truth of money”; he even believes that if this
nonsense were possible, something would be achieved by it. He
believes that any Berlin writer could abolish the “truth of money”
with the same ease as he abolishes in his mind the “truth” of God or
of Hegelian philosophy. That money is a necessary product of
definite relations of production and intercourse and remains a
“truth” so long as these relations exist — this, of course, is of no
concern to a holy man like Saint Max, who raises his eyes towards
heaven and turns his profane backside to the profane world.

The second discovery is made on page 152 and amounts to this,
that “the worker cannot turn his labour to account” because he “falls
into the hands” of “those who” have received “some kind of state
property” “in feudal possession”. This is merely a further explana-
tion of the sentence on page 151 already quoted above where the
state sucks the life-blood of the worker. And here everyone will
immediately “put forward” “the simple reflection” — that “Stirner”
does not do so is not “surprising”— how does it come about
that the state has not given the “workers” also some sort of “state
property” in “feudal possession”. If Saint Max had asked himself
this question he would probably have managed to do without his

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

construction of the “holy” burghers, because he would have been
bound to see the relation in which the propertied stand to the
modern state.

By means of the opposition of the bourgeoisie and proletariat — as
even “Stirner” knows — one arrives at communism. But how one
arrives at it, only “Stirner” knows.

“The workers have the most tremendous power in their hands ... they have only to
cease work and to regard what they have produced by their labour as their property
and to enjoy it. This is the meaning of the workers’ disturbances which flare up here
and there” (p. 153).

Workers’ disturbances, which even under the Byzantine Emperor
Zeno led to the promulgation of a law (Zeno, de novis operibus
constitution , which “flared up” in the fourteenth century in the form
of the Jacquerie and Wat Tyler’s rebellion, in 1518 on the Evil May
Dayb in London, and in 1549 in the great uprising of the tanner
Kett,67 and later gave rise to Act 15 of the second and third year of
the reign of Edward VI, and a series of similar Acts of Parliament;
the disturbances which soon afterwards, in 1640 and 1659 (eight
uprisings in one year), took place in Paris and which already since the
fourteenth century must have been frequent in France and England,
judging by the legislation of the time; the constant war which since
1770 in England and since the revolution in France has been waged
with might and cunning by the workers against the bourgeoisie — all
this exists for Saint Max only “here and there”, in Silesia, Poznan,
Magdeburg and Berlin, “according to German newspaper reports”.

What is produced by labour, according to Jacques le bonhomme’s
imagination, would continue to exist and be reproduced, as an object
to be “regarded” and “enjoyed”, even if the producers “ceased
work”.

As he did earlier in the case of money, now again our good
burgher transforms “the workers”, who are scattered throughout
the civilised world, into a private club which has only to adopt a
decision in order to get rid of all difficulties. Saint Max does not
know, of course, that at least fifty attempts have been made in
England since 1830, and at the present moment yet another is being
made, to gather all the English workers into a single association and
that highly empirical causes have frustrated the success of all these
projects. He does not know that even a minority of workers who
combine and go on strike very soon find themselves compelled to act
in a revolutionary way — a fact he could have learned from the 1842

a Zeno, Decree on New Works. — Ed.

The words “Evil May Day” are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

205

uprising in England and from the earlier Welsh uprising of 1839, in
which year the revolutionary excitement among the workers first
found comprehensive expression in the “sacred month”, which was
proclaimed simultaneously with a general arming of the people.68
Here again we see how Saint Max constantly tries to pass off his
nonsense as “ the meaning” of historical facts (in which he is
successful at best in relation to his “one”) — historical facts “on which
he foists his own meaning, which are thus bound to lead to
nonsense” ( Wigand , p. 194). Incidentally, it would never enter the
head of any proletarian to turn to Saint Max for advice about the
“meaning” of the proletarian movements or what should be
undertaken at the present time against the bourgeoisie.

After this great campaign, our Saint Sancho returns to his
Maritornes with the following fanfare:

“The state rests on the slavery of labour. If labour were to become free, the state
would be lost” (p. 153).

The modern state, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is based on freedom of
labour. The idea that along with freedom of religion, state, thought,
etc., and hence “occasionally” “also” “perhaps” with freedom of
labour, not I become free, but only one of my enslavers — this idea was
borrowed by Saint Max himself, many times, though in a very
distorted form, from the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher .a Freedom of
labour is free competition of the workers among themselves. Saint
Max is very unfortunate in political economy as in all other spheres.
Labour is free in all civilised countries; it is not a matter of freeing
labour but of abolishing it.

B. Communism

Saint Max calls communism “social liberalism”, because he is well
aware how great is the disrepute of the word liberalism among the
radicals of 1842 and the most advanced Berlin “free-thinkers”. 9
This transformation gives him at the same time the opportunity and
courage to put into the mouths of the “social liberals” all sorts of
things which had never been uttered before “Stirner” and the
refutation of which is intended to serve also as a refutation of
communism.

Communism is overcome by means of a series of partly logical and
partly historical constructions.

Cf. present edition, Vol. 3, p. 152. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

First logical construction.

Because “we have seen ourselves made into servants of egoists”, “we should” not
ourselves “become egoists ... but should rather see to it that egoists become impossible.
We want to turn them all into ragamuffins, we want no one to possess anything, in
order that ‘all’ should be possessors. — So say the social [liberals]. — Who is this person
whom you call ‘all’? It is ‘society’” (p. 153).

With the aid of a few quotation marks Sancho here transforms
“all” into a person, society as a person, as a subject =holy society, the
holy. Now our saint knows what he is about and can let loose the
whole torrent of his flaming anger against “the holy”, as the result of
which, of course, communism is annihilated.

That Saint Max here again puts his nonsense into the mouth of the
“social [liberals]”, as being the meaning of their words, is not
“surprising”. He identifies first of all “owning” as a private
property-owner with “owning” in general. Instead of examining the
definite relations between private property and production, instead
of examining “owning” as a landed proprietor, as a rentier, as
a merchant, as a factory-owner, as a worker — where “owning” would
be found to be a quite distinct kind of owning, control over other
people’s labour — he transforms all these relations into “owning as
such”. a

[...] political liberalism, which made the “nation” the supreme
owner. Hence communism has no longer to “abolish” any “personal
property” but, at most, has to equalise the distribution of “feudal
possessions”, to introduce egalite there.

On society as “supreme owner” and on the “ragamuffin”. Saint
Max should compare, inter alia, L’Egalitaire for 1840:

“Social property is a contradiction, but social wealth is a consequence of
communism. Fourier, in contradistinction to the modest bourgeois moralists, repeats a
hundred times that it is not a social evil that some have too much but that all have too
little”, and therefore draws attention also to the “poverty of the rich”, in La fausse
Industrie , Paris, 1835, p. 410.

Similarly as far back as 1839 — hence before Weitling’s Garan-
tienh- — it is stated in the German communist magazine Die Stimme des
Volks (second issue, p. 14) published in Paris:

“Private property, the much praised, industrious, comfortable, innocent ‘private
gain', does obvious harm to the wealth of life .”c

a Four pages of the manuscript are missing here which contained the end of the
“first logical construction ” and the beginning of the “ second logical construction” . — Ed.

Wilhelm Weitling, Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit. — Ed.

c This seems to be a quotation from the article “Politischer und Socialer
Umschwung” published in Blatter der Zukunft, 1846, No. 5. Die Stimme des Volks was
probably mentioned by mistake. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

207

Saint Sancho here takes as communism the ideas of a few liberals
tending towards communism, and the mode of expression of some
communists who, for very practical reasons, express themselves in a
political form.

After “Stirner” has transferred property to “society”, all the
members of this society in his eyes at once become paupers and
ragamuffins, although — even according to his idea of the communist
order of things — they “own” the “supreme owner”. — His benevo-
lent proposal to the communists — “to transform the word ‘Lump’2
into an honourable form of address, just as the revolution did with
the word ‘citizen’ is a striking example of how he confuses
communism with something which long ago passed away. The
revolution even “transformed” the word sansculotte “into an
honourable form of address”, as against “ honnetes gens ”, which he
translates very inadequately as good citizens. Saint Sancho does this
in order that there may be fulfilled the words in the book of the
prophet Merlin about the three thousand and three hundred slaps
which the man who is to come will have to give himself:

Es menester que Sancho tu escudero

Se de tres mil azotes, y trecientos

En ambas sus valientes posaderas

A1 aire descubiertas, y de modo

Que le escuezan, le amarguen y le enfaden.

( Don Quijote, tomo II, cap. 35. )b

Saint Sancho notes that the “elevation of society to supreme
owner” is a “second robbery of the personal element in the interests of
humanity”, while communism is only the completed robbery of the
“robbery of the personal element”. “Since he unquestionably
regards robbery as detestable”, Saint Sancho “therefore believes for
example” that he “has branded” communism “already by the”
above “proposition” (“the book”, p. 102). “Once” “Stirner” has
“detected” “even robbery” in communism, “how could he fail to feel
‘profound disgust’ at it and ‘just indignation’”! ( Wigand , p. 156.) We
now challenge “Stirner” to name a bourgeois who has written about
communism (or Chartism) and has not put forward the same

a Ragamuffin. — Ed.

Needful it is that your squire, Sancho Panza,

Shall deal himself three thousand and three hundred
Lashes upon his two most ample buttocks.

Both to the air exposed, and in such sort

That they shall smart, and sting and vex him sorely.

( Don Quixote, Vol. II, Ch. 35.) — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

absurdity with great emphasis. Communism will certainly carry out
“robbery” of what the bourgeois regards as “personal”.

First corollary.

Page 349: “Liberalism at once came forward with the statement that it is an
essential feature of man to be not property, but property-owner. Since it was a question
here of man, and not of an individual, the question of how much, which was precisely
what constituted the particular interest of individuals, was left to their discretion.
Therefore, the egoism of individuals had the widest scope as regards this how much and
carried on tireless competition.”

That is to say: liberalism, i.e., liberal private property-owners, at
the beginning of the French Revolution gave private property a
liberal appearance by declaring it one of the rights of man. They
were forced to do so if only because of their position as a revolu-
tionising party; they were even compelled not only to give the mass
of the French [rural] population the right to property, [but also] to
let them seize actual property, and they could do all this because
thereby their own “how much”, which was what chiefly interested
them, remained intact and was even made safe.

We find here further that Saint Max makes competition arise from
liberalism, a slap that he gives history in revenge for the slaps which
he had to give himself above. A “more exact explanation” of the
manifesto with which he makes liberalism “ at once come forward”
can be found in Hegel, who in 1820 expressed himself as follows:

“In respect of external things it is rational” (i. e., it becomes me as reason, as a man)
“that I should possess property ... what and how much I possess is, therefore, legally a
matter of chance” ( Rechtsphilosophie ,a § 49).

It is characteristic of Hegel that he turns the phrase of the
bourgeois into the true concept, into the essence of property, and
“Stirner” faithfully imitates him. On the basis of the above analysis,
Saint Max now makes the further statement, that communism

“raised the question as to how much property, and answered it in the sense that man
should have as much as he needs. Can my egoism be satisfied with that?... No. I must
rather have as much as I am capable of appropriating” (p. 349).

First of all it should be remarked here that communism has by no
means originated from § 49 of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie and its “what
and how much”. Secondly, “communism” does not dream of
wanting to give anything to “man”, for “communism” is not at all of
the opinion that “man” “needs” anything apart from a brief critical
elucidation. Thirdly, Stirner foists on to communism the conception

a G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts. The preface to this work is
dated June 25, 1820. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

209

of “need” held by the present-day bourgeois; hence he introduces a
distinction which, on account of its paltriness, can be of importance
only in present-day society and its ideal copy — Stirner’s union of
“individual shouters” and free seamstresses. “Sdrner” has again
achieved great “penetration” into the essence of communism.
Finally, in his demand to have as much as he is capable of
appropriating (if this is not the usual bourgeois phrase that everyone
should have as much as his ability3 permits him, that everyone
should have the right of free gain). Saint Sancho assumes
communism as having already been achieved in order to be able
freely to develop his “ability” and put it into operation, which by no
means depends solely on him, any more than his fortune itself, but
depends also on the relations of production and intercourse in which
he lives. (Cf. the chapter on the “Union”. b) Incidentally, even Saint
Max himself does not behave according to his doctrine, for
throughout his “book” he “needs” things and uses things which he
was not “capable of appropriating”.

Second corollary.'

“But the social reformers preach a social law to us. The individual thus becomes
the slave of society” (p. 246). “In the opinion of the communists, everyone should
enjoy the eternal rights of man” (p. 238).

Concerning the expressions “law”, “labour”, etc., how they are
used by proletarian writers and what should be the attitude of
criticism towards them, we shall speak in connection with “True
Socialism” (see Volume II). As far as law is concerned, we with many
others have stressed the opposition of communism to law, both
political and private, as also in its most general form as the rights of
man. See the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher, where privilege, the
special right, is considered as something corresponding to private
property inseparable from social classes, and law as something
corresponding to the state of competition, of free private property
(p. 206 and elsewhere); equally, the rights of man themselves are
considered as privilege, and private property as monopoly. Further,
criticism of law is brought into connection with German philosophy
and presented as the consequence of criticism of religion (p. 72);
further, it is expressly stated that the legal axioms that are supposed
to lead to communism are axioms of private property, and the right
of common ownership is an imaginary premise of the right of private

3 The German word Vermogen used several times in this passage means not only
ability, capability but also wealth, fortune, means, property; the authors here play on
the various meanings of the word. — Ed.
b See this volume, pp. 393-94. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

property (pp. 98, 99).a Incidentally, even in the works of German
communists passages appeared very early — e.g., in the writings of
Hess, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, 1843, p. 326b and
elsewhere — which could be appropriated and distorted “by Stirner”
in his criticism of law.

Incidentally, the idea of using the phrase quoted above against
Babeuf, of regarding him as the theoretical representative of
communism could only occur to a Berlin school-master. “Stirner”,
however, has the effrontery to assert on page 247 that

communism, which assumes “that all people by nature have equal rights, refutes its
own thesis and asserts that people by nature have no rights at all. For it does not want,
for example, to admit that parents have rights in relation to their children; it abolishes
the family. In general, this whole revolutionary or Babouvist principle (compare Die
Kommunisten in der Schweiz, Kommissionalberichtf p. 3) is based on a religious, i.e., false,
outlook”.

A Yankee comes to England, where he is prevented by a Justice of
the Peace from flogging his slave, and he exclaims indignantly: “Do
you call this a land of liberty, where a man can’t larrup his nigger?”d

Saint Sancho here makes himself doubly ridiculous. Firstly, he sees
an abolition of the “equal rights of man” in the recognition of the
“equal rights by nature” of children in relation to parents, in the
granting of the same rights of man to children as well as to parents.
Secondly, two pages previously Jacques le bonhomme tells us that the
state does not interfere when a father beats his son, because it
recognises family rights. Thus, what he presents, on the one hand, as
a particular right (family right), he includes, on the other hand,
among the “equal rights of man by nature”. Finally, he admits that
he knows Babeuf only from the Bluntschli report, while this report
(p. 3), in turn, admits that its wisdom is derived from the worthy
L. Stein,e Doctor of Law. Saint Sancho’s thorough knowledge of
communism is evident from this quotation. Just as Saint Bruno is his
broker as regards revolution, so Saint Bluntschli is his broker as

a Cf. “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” by Engels and Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction and “On the Jewish Question”
by Marx (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 418, 175, 146. — Ed.

b This refers to Moses Hess’ article “Philosophic der That”, which was published
in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz. — Ed.

c Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz nach den bei Weitling
vorgefundenen Papieren. — Ed.

d This sentence is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

e Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

211

regards communists. With such a state of affairs we ought not to be
surprised that a few lines lower down our rustic word of Goda
reduces the fraternite of the revolution to “equality of the children of
God” (in what Christian dogma is there any talk of egalite?).

Third corollary.

Page 414: Because the principle of community culminates in communism,
therefore, communism = “apotheosis of the state founded on love”.

From the state founded on love, which is Saint Max’s own
fabrication, he here derives communism which then, of course,
remains an exclusively Stirnerian communism. Saint Sancho knows
only egoism on the one hand or the claim to the loving services, pity
and alms of people on the other hand. Outside and above this
dilemma nothing exists for him at all.

Third logical construction.

“Since the most oppressive evils are to be observed in society, it is especially” (!)
“the oppressed” (!) who “think that the blame is to be found in society and set
themselves the task of discovering the right society” (p. 155).

On the contrary, it is “Stirner” who “sets himself the task” of
discovering the “society” which is “right” for him, the holy society,
the society as the incarnation of the holy. Those who are
“oppressed” nowadays “in society”, “think” only about how to
achieve the society which is right for them, and this consists primarily
in abolishing the present society on the basis of the existing
productive forces. If, e.g., “oppressive evils are to be observed” in a
machine, if, for example, it refuses to work, and those who need the
machine (for example, in order to make money) find the fault in the
machine and try to alter it, etc. — then, in Saint Sancho’s opinion, they
are setting themselves the task not of putting the machine right, but
of discovering the right machine, the holy machine, the machine as
the incarnation of the holy, the holy as a machine, the machine in the
heavens. “Stirner” advises them to seek the blame “in themselves ”. Is
it not their fault that, for example, they need a hoe and a plough?
Could they not use their bare hands to plant potatoes and to extract
them from the soil afterwards? The saint, on page 156, preaches to
them as follows:

“It is merely an ancient phenomenon that one seeks first of all to lay the blame
anywhere but on oneself — and therefore on the state, on the selfishness of the rich, for
which, however, we ourselves are to blame.”

The “oppressed” who seeks to lay the “blame” for pauperism on
the “state” is, as we have noted above, no other than Jacques le

a Cf. August Friedrich Ernst Langbein’s poem, Der Landprediger. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

bonhomme himself. Secondly, the “oppressed” who comforts
himself by causing the “blame” to be laid on the “selfishness of the
rich” is again no other than Jacques le bonhomme. He could have
learned something better about the other oppressed from the Facts
and Fictions of John Watts,3 tailor and doctor of philosophy, from
Hobson’s Poor Man's Companion, etc. And, thirdly, who is the person
that should bear the “blame”? Is it, perhaps, the proletarian child
who comes into the world tainted with scrofula, who is reared with
the help of opium and is sent into the factory when seven years
old — or is it, perhaps, the individual worker who is here expected to
“revolt” by himself against the world market — or is it, perhaps, the
girl who must either starve or become a prostitute? No, not these but
only he who seeks “all the blame”, i.e., the “blame” for everything
in the present state of the world, “in himself”, viz., once again no
other than Jacques le bonhomme himself. “This is merely the
ancient phenomenon” of Christian heart -searching and doing peni-
tence in a German-speculative form, with its idealist phraseology,
according to which I, the actual man, do not have to change
actuality, which I can only change together with others, but have
to change myself in myself. “It is the internal struggle of the writer
with himself” ( Die heilige Familie, p. 122, cf. pp. 73, 121 and 306).b

According to Saint Sancho, therefore, those oppressed by society
seek the right society. If he were consistent, he should make those
who “seek to lay the blame on the state” — and according to him
they are the very same people — also seek the right state. But he cannot
do this, because he has heard that the communists want to abolish
the state. He has now to construct this abolition of the state, and our
Saint Sancho once more achieves this with the aid of his “ass”, the
apposition, in a way that “looks very simple”:

“Since the workers are in a state of distress” [ Notstand ], “the existing state of affairs”

[ Stand der Dinge ], “i.e., the state” [ Staat ] ( status = state or estate) “must be abolished”
(ibid.).

Thus:

the state of distress
the existing state of affairs
state, estate
status

the existing state of affairs
state or estate
status
the State

Conclusion: the state of distress = the State.

3 John Watts, The Facts and Fictions of Political Economists. — Ed.
b See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 83, 53, 82, 192. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

213

What could “look simpler”? “It is only surprising” that the English
bourgeois in 1688 and the French in 1789 did not “put forward” the
same “simple reflections” and equations, since in those times it was
much more the case that estate = status = the State. It follows from this
that wherever a “state of distress” exists, “the State”, which is, of
course, the same in Prussia and North America, must be abolished.

As is his custom, Saint Sancho now presents us with a few proverbs
of Solomon.

Proverb of Solomon No. 1.

Page 163: “That society is no ego, which could give, etc., but an instrument from
which we can derive benefit; that we have no social duties, but only interests; that we
do not owe any sacrifices to society, but if we do sacrifice something we sacrifice it for
ourselves — all this is disregarded by the social [liberals], because they are in thrall to
the religious principle and are zealously striving for a — holy society.”

The following “penetrations” into the essence of communism
result from this;

1. Saint Sancho has quite forgotten that it was he himself who
transformed “society” into an “ego” and that consequently he finds
himself only in his own “society”.

2. He believes that the communists are only waiting for “society”
to “give” them something, whereas at most they want to give
themselves a society.

3. He transforms society, even before it exists, into an instrument
from which he wants to derive benefit, without him and other people
by their mutual social relations creating a society, and hence this
“instrument”.

4. He believes that in communist society there can be a question of
“duties” and “interests”, of two complementary aspects of an
antithesis which exists only in bourgeois society (under the guise of
interest the reflecting bourgeois always inserts a third thing between
himself and his mode of action — a habit seen in truly classic form in
Bentham, whose nose had to have some interest before it would
decide to smell anything. Compare “the book” on the right to one’s
nose, page 247).

5. Saint Max believes that the communists want to “make
sacrifices” for “society”, when they want at most to sacrifice existing
society; in this case he should describe their consciousness that their
struggle is the common cause of all people who have outgrown the
bourgeois system as a sacrifice that they make to themselves.

6. That the social [liberals] are in thrall to the religious principle
and

7. that they are striving for a holy society — these points have
already been dealt with above. How “zealously” Saint Sancho

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“strives” for a “holy society”, so as to be able to refute communism
by means of it, we have already seen.

Proverb of Solomon No. 2.

Page 277: “If interest in the social problem were less passionate and blind, then one
... w ould understand that a society cannot be turned into a new one so long as those of
whom it consists and who constitute it remain as of old.”

“Stirner” believes that the communist proletarians who revolu-
tionise society and put the relations of production and the form of
intercourse on a new basis — i.e., on themselves as new people, on
their new mode of life — that these proletarians remain “as of old”.
The tireless propaganda carried on by these proletarians, their daily
discussions among themselves, sufficiently prove how little they
themselves want to remain “as of old”, and how little they want
people to remain “as of old”. They would only remain “as of old” if,
with Saint Sancho, they “sought the blame in themselves”; but they
know too well that only under changed circumstances will they cease
to be “as of old”, and therefore they are determined to change these
circumstances at the first opportunity. In revolutionary activity the
changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances. —
This great saying is explained by means of an equally great example
which, of course, is again taken from the world of “the holy”.

“If, for example, the Jewish people was to give rise to a society which spread a new
faith throughout the world, then these apostles could not remain Pharisees.”

The first Christians = a society for spreading faith (founded

anno 1).

_ Congregatio de propaganda fide70
(founded anno 1640).

Anno 1 =Anno 1640.

This society which should arise = These apostles.

These apostles = Non-Jews.

The Jewish people = Pharisees.

Christians = Non-Pharisees.

= Not the Jewish people.

What can look simpler?

Reinforced by these equations. Saint Max calmly utters the great
historic wordsa:

“Human beings, by no means intending to achieve their own development, have
always wanted to form a society.” .

Human beings, by no means wanting to form a society, have,
nevertheless, only achieved the development of society, because they

a Paraphrase of a line from Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Act 1, Scene 3. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

215

have always wanted to develop only as isolated individuals and
therefore achieved their own development only in and through
society. Incidentally it would only occur to a saint of the type of our
Sancho to separate the development of “human beings” from the
development of the “society” in which they live, and then let his
fantasy roam on this fantastic basis. Incidentally, he has forgotten his
own proposition, inspired by Saint Bruno, in which just previously
he set people the moral demand of changing themselves and thereby
changing their society — a proposition, therefore, in which he
identifies the development of people with the development of their
society.

Fourth logical construction.

On page 156 he makes the communists say, in opposition to the
citizens:

“Our essence” (!) ‘‘does not consist in all of us being equal children of the state” (!),
“but in that we all exist for one another. We are all equal in that we all exist for one
another, that each works for the other, that each of us is a worker.” He then regards
“to exist as a worker” as equivalent to “each of us exists only through the other”, so
that the other, “for example, works to clothe me, and I to satisfy his need of
entertainment, he for my food and I for his instruction. Hence participation in
labour is our dignity and our equality.

“What advantage do we derive from citizenship? Burdens. And what value is put
on our labour? The lowest possible.... What can you put against us? Again, only
labour!” “Only for labour do we owe you a recompense”; “only for what you do that is
useful to us” “have you any claim on us”. “We want to be only worth so much to you as
we perform for you; but you should be valued by us in just the same way.” “Deeds
which are of some value to us, i.e., work beneficial to the community, determine
value.... He who does something useful takes second place to no one, or — all workers
(beneficial to the community) are equal. Since however the worker is worthy of his
wagea, then let the wage also be equal” (pp. 157,158).

With “Stirner”, “communism” begins with searchings for “ es-
sence”; being a good “youth” he wants again only to “penetrate
behind things”. That communism is a highly practical movement,
pursuing practical aims by practical means, and that only perhaps in
Germany, in opposing the German philosophers, can it spare a
moment for the problem of “essence” — this, of course, is of no
concern to our saint. This Stirnerian “communism”, which yearns so
much for “essence”, arrives, therefore, only at a philosophical
category, i.e., “being-for-one-another”, which then by means of a
few arbitrary equations:

Being-for-one-another = to exist only through another

= to exist as a worker

= universal community of workers

a Cf. Luke 10:7 .— Ed.

0—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

is brought somewhat closer to the empirical world. We would,
moreover, challenge Saint Sancho to indicate, for example, in Owen
(who, after all, as a representative of English communism can serve
as an example of “communism” just as well as, for example, the
non-communist Proudhon,* from whom the greater part of the
above propositions were abstracted and then rearranged) a passage
containing anything of these propositions about “essence”, universal
community of workers, etc. Incidentally we do not even have to go so
far back. The third issue of Die Stimme des Volks, the German
communist magazine already quoted above, says:

“What is today called labour is only a miserably small part of the vast, mighty
process of production; for religion and morality honour with the name of labour only
the kind of production that is repulsive and dangerous, and in addition they venture
to embellish such labour with all kinds of maxims — as it were words of blessing (or
witchcraft) — ‘labour in the sweat of thy brow’ as a test imposed by God; ‘labour
sweetens life’ for encouragement, etc. The morality of the world in which we live takes
very good care not to apply the term work to the pleasing and free aspects of human
intercourse. These aspects are reviled by morality, although they too constitute
production. Morality eagerly reviles them as vanity, vain pleasure, sensuality.
Communism has exposed this hypocritical preaching, this miserable morality.”3

As universal community of workers, Saint Max reduces the whole
of communism to equal wages — a discovery which is then repeated in
the following three “refractions”: on page 351, “Against competi-
tion there rises the principle of the society of ragamuffins — distribu-
tion. Is it possible then that I, who am very resourceful, b should have
no advantage over one who is resourceless?” Further, on page 363,
he speaks of a “universal tax on human activity in communist
society”. And, finally, on page 350, he ascribes to the communists the
view that “labour” is “the only resource” of man. Thus, Saint Max
re-introduces into communism private property in its dual form — as

* Proudhon, who was as early as 1841 strongly criticised by the communist
workers’ journal La Fraternite for advocating equal wages, community of workers in
general and also the other economic prejudices which can be found in the works of
this outstanding writer; Proudhon, from whom the communists have accepted
nothing but his criticism of property. [The note was left unfinished.]

a This seems to be a quotation from the article “Politischer und Socialer
Umschwung” published in Blatter der Zukunft, 1846, No. 5. Die Stimme des Volks was
probably mentioned by mistake. — Ed.

b In this section the authors play on the different meanings of the word
Vermogen and its derivatives vielvermogend, unvermogend, etc. Der Vielvermogende
can denote a person who is able, capable, wealthy, powerful, resourceful, a man of
property, etc.; der Unvermogende on the other hand, can mean unable, incapable,
inept, powerless, impecunious, resourceless, etc. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

217

distribution and wage-labour. As before in connection with “rob-
bery”, Saint Max here again displays the most ordinary and
narrow-minded bourgeois views as “his own” “penetrations” into
the essence of communism. He shows himself fully worthy of the
honour of having been taught by Bluntschli. As a real
petty bourgeois, he is then afraid that he, “who is very resource-
ful”, “should have no advantage over one who is resourceless” —
although he should fear nothing so much as being left to his own
“resources”.

Incidentally, he “who is very resourceful” imagines that citizen-
ship is a matter of indifference to the proletarians, after he has first
assumed that they have it. This is just as he imagined above that for
the bourgeoisie the form of government is a matter of indifference.
The workers attach so much importance to citizenship, i.e., to active
citizenship, that where they have it, for instance in America, they
“make good use” of it, and where they do not have it, they strive to
obtain it. Compare the proceedings of the North American workers
at innumerable meetings, the whole history of English Chartism, and
of French communism and reformism.71

First corollary.

“The worker, being conscious that the essential thing about him is that he is a
worker, keeps himself away from egoism and subordinates himself to the supremacy
of a society of workers, just as the bourgeois adhered with devotion” (!) “to the state
based on competition” (p. 162).

The worker is at most conscious that for the bourgeois the essential
thing about him is that he is a worker, who, therefore, can assert
himself against the bourgeois as such. Both these discoveries of Saint
Sancho, the “devotion of the bourgeois” and the “ state based on
competition”, can be recorded only as fresh proofs of the
“resourcefulness” of the “very resourceful” man.

Second corollary.

“The aim of communism is supposed to be the ‘well-being of all'. This indeed really
looks as though in this way no one need be in an inferior position. But what sort of
well-being will this be? Have all one and the same well-being? Do all people feel
equally well in one and the same circumstances?... If that is so, then it is a matter of
‘true well-being’. Do we not thereby arrive precisely at the point where the tyranny of
religion begins?... Society has decreed that a particular sort of well-being is ‘true
well-being’, and if this well-being were, for example, honestly earned enjoyment, but you
preferred enjoyable idleness, then society ... would prudently refrain from making
provision for what is for you well-being. By proclaiming the well-being of all,
communism destroys the well-being of those who up to now have lived as rentiers”,
etc. (pp. 411. 412).

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“If that is so”, the following equations result from it:

The well-being of all = Communism
= If that is so

= One and the same well-being of all
= Equal well-being of all in one and
the same circumstances
= True well-being

= [Holy well-being, the holy, the rule of
the holy, hierarchy]3
= Tyranny of religion.

Communism = Tyranny of religion.

“This indeed really looks as though” “Stirner” has said the same
thing about communism as he has said previously about everything
else.

How deeply our saint has “penetrated” into the essence of
communism is evident also from the fact that he ascribes to
communism the desire to bring about “true well-being” in the shape
of “honestlv earned enjoyment”. Who, except “Stirner” and a few
Berlin cobblers and tailors, thinks of “honestly earned enjoyment”!*
And, what is more, to put this into the mouth of communists, for
whom the basis of this whole opposition between work and
enjoyment disappears. Let our highly moral saint put his mind at
rest on this score. “Honest earning” will be left to him and those
whom, unknown to himself, he represents — his petty handicrafts-
men who have been ruined by industrial freedom and are morally
“indignant”. “Enjoyable idleness”, too, belongs wholly to the most
trivial bourgeois outlook. But the crowning point of the whole
statement is the artful bourgeois scruple that he raises against the
communists: that they want to abolish the “well-being” of the ren-
tier and yet talk about the “well-being of all”. Consequently, he
believes that in communist society there will still be rentiers, whose
“well-being” would have to be abolished. He asserts that “well-
being” as rentier is inherent in the individuals who are at present
rentiers, that it is inseparable from their individuality, and he
imagines that for these individuals there can exist no other “well-
being” than that which is determined by their position as rentiers.

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Who, except Stirner, is
able to attribute such moral absurdities to the immoral revolutionary proletarians,
who, as the whole civilised world knows (Berlin, being merely “educated” [jebildet], of
course does not belong to the civilised world), have the wicked intention not “honestly
to earn” their “enjoyment” but to take it by conquest!

3 This passage is enclosed in square brackets in the manuscript. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

219

He believes further that a society which has still to wage a struggle
against rentiers and the like, is already organised in a communist
way.* The communists, at any rate, will have no scruples about
overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie and abolishing its “well-
being”, as soon as they are strong enough to do so.** It does not
matter to them at all whether this “well-being” common to their
enemies and determined by class relations also appeals as personal
“well-being” to a sentimentality which is narrow-mindedly presumed
to exist.

Third corollary.

On page 190, in communist society

“worry arises again in the form of labour”.

The good citizen “Stirner”, who is already rejoicing that he will
again find his beloved “worry” in communism, has nevertheless
miscalculated this time. “Worry” is nothing but the mood of
oppression and anxiety which in the middle class is the necessary
companion of labour, of beggarly activity for securing scanty
earnings. “Worry” flourishes in its purest form among the German
good burghers, where it is chronic and “always identical with itself”,
miserable and contemptible, whereas the poverty of the proletarian
assumes an acute, sharp form, drives him into a life-and-death
struggle, makes him a revolutionary, and therefore engenders not
“worry”, but passion. If then communism wants to abolish both the
“worry” of the burgher and the poverty of the proletarian, it goes
without saying that it cannot do this without abolishing the cause of
both, i.e., “labour”.

We now come to the historical constructions of communism.

First historical construction.

“So long as faith was sufficient for the honour and dignity of man, no objection
could be raised against any, even the most arduous labour.” ... “The oppressed classes

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] And finally he makes
the moral demand that the communists should quietly allow themselves to be
exploited to all eternity by rentiers, merchants, factory-owners, etc., because they can-
not abolish this exploitation without at the same time destroying the “well-being” of
these gentlemen. Jacques le bonhomme, who poses here as the champion of the gros-
bourgeois, can save himself the trouble of preaching moralising sermons to the
communists, who can every day hear much better ones from his “good burghers”.

** [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] ... and they will have
no scruples about it precisely because for them the “well-being of all” regarded as
“corporeal individuals” is more important than the “well-being” of the hitherto
existing social classes. The “well-being” which the rentier enjoys as rentier is not the
“well-being” of the individual as such, but of the rentier, not an individual well-being
but a well-being that is general within the framework of the class.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

could tolerate their misery only so long as they were Christians” (the most that can be
said is that they were Christians so long as they tolerated their miserable position), “for
Christianity” (which stands behind them with a stick) “keeps their grumbling and
indignation in check” (p. 158).

“How ‘Stirner’ knows so well” what the oppressed classes could do,
we learn from the first issue of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,
where “criticism in the form of a master-bookbinder” quotes the
following passage from an unimportant book:2

“Modern pauperism has assumed a political character; whereas formerly the
beggar bore his fate submissively and regarded it as God’s will, the modern ragamuffin
asks whether he is forced to drag out his life in poverty just because he chanced to be
born in rags.”

It was due to this power of Christianity that during the liberation
of the feudal serfs the most bloody and embittered struggles were
precisely those against the spiritual feudal lords, and it was carried
through despite all the grumbling and indignation of Christianity as
embodied in the priests (cf. Eden, History of the Poor, Book Ib; Guizot,
Histoire de la civilisation en France ; Monteil, Histoire des Francois des
divers etats, etc.), while, on the other hand, the minor priests,
particularly at the beginning of the Middle Ages, incited the feudal
serfs to “grumbling” and “indignation” against the temporal feudal
lords (cf., inter alia , even the well-known capitulary of Char-
lemagne72). Compare also what was written above in connection with
the “workers’ disturbances which flared up here and there”, about
the “oppressed classes” and their revolts in the fourteenth century.0

The earlier forms of workers’ uprisings were connected with the
degree of development of labour in each case and the resulting form
of property; direct or indirect communist uprisings were connected
with large-scale industry. Instead of going into this extensive history,
Saint Max accomplishes a holy transition from the patient oppressed
classes to the impatient oppressed classes:

“Now, when everyone ought to develop into a man ” (“how,” for example, do the
Catalonian workers “know” that “everyone ought to develop into a man”?), “the
confining of man to machine labour amounts to slavery” (p. 158).

Hence, prior to Spartacus and the uprising of the slaves, it was
Christianity that prevented the “confining of man to machine

a The passage is from August Theodor Woeniger’s book Publicistische Abhand-
lungen, quoted by Carl Ernst Reichardt — “the master-bookbinder” — in his article
“Schriften uber den Pauperismus” (cf. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy
Family, in the present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 9-11). — Ed.

b Frederic Morton Eden, The State of the Poor, or, an History of the Labouring Classes
in England. — Ed.

c See this volume, p. 204. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 221

labour” from “amounting to slavery”; and in the days of Spartacus it
was only the concept of “man” that removed this relation and
brought about slavery. “Or did” Stirner “perhaps” “even” hear
something about the connection between modern labour unrest and
machine production and wanted here to give an intimation of this?
In that case it was not the introduction of machine labour that
transformed the workers into rebels, but the introduction of the
concept of “man” that transformed machine labour into slav-
ery.— “If that is so” then “it indeed really looks as though” we have
here a “unique” history of the workers’ movements.

Second historical construction.

“The bourgeoisie has preached the gospel of material enjoyment and is now
surprised that this doctrine finds supporters among us proletarians” (p. 159).

Just now the workers wanted to realise the concept of “man”, the
holy; now it is “material enjoyment”, the worldly; above it was a
question of the “drudgery” of labour, now it is only the labour of
enjoyment. Saint Sancho strikes himself here on ambas sus valientes
posaderasa — first of all on material history, and then on Stirner’s, holv
history. According to material history, it was the aristocracy that first
put the gospel of worldlv enjoyment in the place of enjoyment of the
gospel; it was at first for the aristocracy that the sober bourgeoisie
applied itself to work and it very cunningly left to the aristocracy the
enjoyment from which it was debarred by its own laws (whereby the
power of the aristocracy passed in the form of money into the
pockets of the bourgeoisie).

According to Stirner’s history, the bourgeoisie was satisfied to seek
“the holy”, to pursue the cult of the state and to “transform all
existing objects into imaginary ones”, and it required the Jesuits to
“save sensuousness from complete decay”. According to this same
Stirnerian history, the bourgeoisie usurped all power by means of
revolution, consequently also its gospel, that of material enjoyment,
although according to the same Stirnerian history we have now
reached the point where “ideas alone rule the world”. Stirner’s
hierarchy thus finds itself ilentre ambas posaderas” .

Third historical construction.

Page 159: “After the bourgeois had given freedom from the commands and
arbitrariness of individuals, there remained the arbitrariness which arises from the
conjuncture of conditions and which can be called the fortuitousness of circumstances.
There remained — luck and those favoured by luck.”

Saint Sancho then makes the communists “find a law and a new
order which puts an end to these fluctuations” (the thingumbob),

a His two most ample buttocks. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

about which order he knows this much, that the communists should
now proclaim: “Let this order henceforth be holy!” (whereas he
ought now rather to have proclaimed: Let the disorder of my
fantasies be the holy order of the communists). “Here is wisdom”
(Revelation of St. John, 13 : 18). “Let him that hath understanding
count the number” of absurdities which Stirner — usually so verbose
and always repeating himself — [here] squeezes into a few [lines].

In its most general form the first proposition reads: after the
bourgeoisie had abolished feudalism, the bourgeoisie remained. Or:
after the domination of individuals had been abolished in “Stirner’s”
imagination, precisely the opposite remained to be done. “It indeed
really looks as though” one could bring the two most distant
historical epochs into a relationship which is the holy relationship,
the relationship as the holy, the relationship in heaven.

Incidentally, this proposition of Saint Sancho’s is not satisfied with
the above-mentioned mode simple of absurdity, it has to bring it to the
mode compose and bicompose a of absurdity. For, firstly, Saint Max
believes the bourgeoisie which liberates itself that, by liberating itself
from the commands and arbitrariness of individuals, it has liberated
the mass of society as a whole from the commands and arbitrariness
of individuals. Secondly, in reality it liberated itself not from the
“commands and arbitrariness of individuals”, but from the domina-
tion of the corporation, the guild, the estates, and hence was now for
the first time, as actual individual bourgeois, in a position to impose
“commands and arbitrariness” on the workers. Thirdly, it only
abolished the more or less idealistic appearance of the former
commands and former arbitrariness of individuals, in order to
establish instead these commands and this arbitrariness in their
material crudity. He, the bourgeois, wanted his “commands and
arbitrariness” to be no longer restricted by the hitherto existing
"commands and arbitrariness” of political power concentrated in
the monarch, the nobility and the corporations, but at most re-
stricted only by the general interests of the whole bourgeois
class, as expressed in bourgeois legislation. He did nothing more
than abolish the commands and arbitrariness over the commands
and arbitrariness of the individual bourgeois (see “Political
Liberalism”).

Instead of making a real analysis of the conjuncture of conditions,
which with the rule of the bourgeoisie became a totally different
conjuncture of totally different conditions, Saint Sancho leaves it in

J These terms were used by Charles Fourier (see Ch. Fourier, Theorie de I’unite
universelle) . — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

223

the form of the general category “conjuncture, etc.”, and bestows on
it the still more indefinite name of “fortuitousness of cir-
cumstances”, as though the “commands and arbitrariness of
individuals” are not themselves a “conjuncture of conditions”.
Having thus done away with the real basis of communism, i.e., the
definite conjuncture of conditions under the bourgeois regime, he
can now also transform this airy communism into his holy
communism. “It indeed really looks” as though “Stirner” is a “man
with only ideal”, imagined, historical “wealth” — the “ perfect ragamuf-
fin”. See “the book”, p. 362.

This great construction or, rather, its major proposition is once
more and with great emphasis repeated on page 189 in the following
form:

“Political liberalism abolished the inequality of master and servant; it made people
masterless, anarchic” (!); “the master was then separated from the individual, from the
egoist, to become a spectre, the law or the state.”

Domination of spectres = (hierarchy) = absence of domination,
equivalent to the domination of the “omnipotent” bourgeois. As we
see, this domination of spectres is, on the contrary, the domination of
the many actual masters; hence with equal justification communism
could be regarded as liberation from this domination of the many.
This, however, Saint Sancho could not do, for then not only his
logical constructions of communism but also the whole construction
of “the free ones” would be overthrown. But this is how it is
throughout “the book”. A single conclusion from our saint’s own
premises, a single historical fact, overthrows the entire series of
penetrations and results.

Fourth historical construction. On page 350, Saint Sancho derives
communism directly from the abolition of serfdom.

I. Major proposition :

“Extremely much was gained when people succeeded in being regarded ” (!) “as
property-owners. Thereby serfdom was abolished and everyone who until then had
himself been property henceforth became a master .”

(According to the mode simple of absurdity this means: serfdom was
abolished as soon as it was abolished.) The mode compose of this ab-
surdity is that Saint Sancho believes that people became “property-
owners” by means of holy contemplation, by means of “regard-
ing” and “being regarded”, whereas the difficulty consisted in
becoming a “property-owner”, and consideration came later of
itself. The mode bicompose of the absurdity is that when the abolition
of serfdom, which at first was still partial, had begun to develop its
consequences and thereby became universal, people ceased to be

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

able to “succeed” in being “regarded” as worth owning (for the
property-owners those they owned had become too expensive);
consequently the vast mass “who until then had themselves been
property”, i.e., unfree workers, became as a result not “masters”, but
free workers.

II. Minor historical proposition, which embraces about eight cen-
turies, although one “will of course not perceive how momentous” it
is (cf. Wigand, p. 194).

“However, henceforth your having [ Dein Haben] and what you have [ Deine Habe ] no
longer suffices, and is no longer recognised; on the other hand, your working and your
work increases in value. We now respect your mastery of things as previously” (?) “we
respected your possession of them. Your labour is your wealth. You are now the
master or possessor of what you have obtained by work and not by inheritance” (ibid.).

“Henceforth” — “no longer” — “on the other hand” — “now” — “as
previously” — “now” — “or” — “not” — such is the content of this
proposition.

Although “Stirner” has “now” arrived at this, that you (viz.,
Szeliga) are the master of what you have obtained by work and not by
inheritance, it “now” occurs to him that just the opposite is the case
at present — and so he causes communism to be born as a monster
from these two distorted propositions.

III. Communist conclusion.

“Since, however, now everything is inherited and every farthing you possess
bears not the stamp of work, but of inheritance” (the culminating absurdity), “SO
everything must be remoulded.”

On this basis Szeliga is able to imagine that he has arrived at both
the rise and fall of the medieval communes, and the communism of
the nineteenth century. And thereby Saint Max, despite everything
“inherited” and “obtained by work”, does not arrive at any “mastery
of things”, but at most at “having” nonsense.

Lovers of constructions can now see in addition on page 421 how
Saint Max, after constructing communism from serfdom, then
constructs it again in the form of serfdom under a liege lord —
society — on the same model as he already, above, transformed the
means by which we earn something into the “holy”, by “grace” of
winch something is given to us. Now, in conclusion, we shall deal in
addition only with a few “penetrations” into the essence of
communism, which follow from the premises given above.

First of all, “Stirner” gives a new theory of exploitation which consists
in this:

“the worker in a pin factory performs only one piece of work, only plays into the hand
of another and is used, exploited by that other” (p. 158).

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

225

Thus, here “Stirner” makes the discovery that the workers in a
factory exploit one another, since they “play into the hands” of one
another; whereas the factory-owner, whose hands do not work at all,
cannot, therefore, exploit the workers. “Stirner” here gives a
striking example of the lamentable position in which communism
has put the German theoreticians. Now they have to concern
themselves also with mundane things like pin factories, etc.,. in
relation to which they behave like real barbarians, like Ojibbeway
Indians and New Zealanders.

Stirnerian communism “on the contrary says” (ibid.):

“All work should have the aim of satisfying ‘man’. Therefore, he” (“man”) “must
become master of it, i.e., be able to perform it as a totality.”

“Man” must become a master! — “Man” remains a maker of
pin-heads, but he has the consolation of knowing that the pin-head is
part of the pin and that he is able to make the whole pin. The fatigue
and disgust caused by the eternally repeated making of pin-heads is
transformed, by this knowledge, into the “satisfaction of man”.
O Proudhon!

A further penetration:

“Since communists declare that only free activity is the essence” ( iterum Crispinusd)
“of man, they, like every workaday mode of thought, need a Sunday, a time of exaltation
and devotion, in addition to their dull labour

Apart from the “essence of man” that is dragged in here, the
unfortunate Sancho is forced to convert “free activity”, which is for
the communists the creative manifestation of life arising from the
free development of all abilities of the “whole fellow” (in order to
make it comprehensible to “Stirner”), into “dull labour”, for our
Berliner notices that the question here is not one of the “hard work
of thought”. By this simple transformation the communists can now
also be transposed into the “workaday mode of thought”. Then, of
course, together with the work -day of the middle class its Sunday also
is to be found again in communism.

Page 161 : “The Sunday aspect of communism consists in the communist seeing in
you the man, the brother.”

Thus, the communist appears here as “man” and as “worker”.
This Saint Sancho calls (loc. cit.) “a dual employment of man by the
communists — an office of material earning and one of spiritual
earning”.

d Crispinus again. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Here, therefore, he brings back even “earning” and bureaucracy
into communism which, of course, thereby “attains its final goal”
and ceases to be communism. Incidentally he has to do this, because
in his “union”, which he will construct later, each also is given a
“dual position” — as man and as the “unique”. For the present he
legitimises this dualism by foisting it on communism, a method we
shall find again in his theory of feudalism and of utilisation.

On page 344 “Stirner” believes that the “communists” want to
“settle the question of property amicably”, and on page 413 he even
makes them appeal to the self-sacrifice of people [and to] the
self-denying disposition of the capitalists!* The few non-
revolutionary communist bourgeois who made their appearance since
the time of Babeuf were a rare occurrence; the vast majority of the
communists in all countries are revolutionary. All communists in
France reproach the followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier with their
peaceableness and differ from the latter chiefly in their having
abandoned all hope of an “amicable settlement”, just as in Britain it
is the same criterion which chiefly distinguishes the Chartists from
the socialists. Saint Max could discover the communist view of the
“self-denying disposition of the rich” and the “self-sacrifice of
people” from a few passages of Cabet, the very communist who
most of all could give the impression that he appeals for devoument,
self-sacrifice. These passages are aimed against the republicans and
especially against the attacks on communism made by Monsieur
Buchez, who still commands the following of a very small number of
workers in Paris:

“The same thing applies to self-sacrifice ( devoument ); it is the doctrine of Monsieur
Buchez, this time divested of its Catholic form, for Monsieur Buchez undoubtedly
fears that his Catholicism is repugnant to the mass of the workers, and drives them
away. ‘In order to fulfil their duty ( devoir ) worthily’ — says Buchez — ‘self-sacrifice
(devoument) is needed.’ — Let those who can understand the difference between devoir
and devoument. — ‘We require self-sacrifice from everyone, both for great national
unity and for the workers’ association ... it is necessary for us to be united, always
devoted ( devoues ) to one another.’ — It is necessary, it is necessary — that is easy to say,
and people have been saying it for a long time and they will go on saying it for a very
long time yet without any more success, if they cannot devise other means! Buchez
complains of the self-seeking of the rich; but what is the use of such complaints? All
who are unwilling to sacrifice themselves Buchez declares to be enemies.

“‘If,’ he says, ‘impelled by egoism, a man refuses to sacrifice himself for others,
what is to be done?... We have not a moment’s hesitation in answering: society always

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Here Saint Max again
ascribes to himself the wisdom of seizing and striking, as though his whole harangue
about the rebellious proletariat were not an unsuccessful travesty of Weitling and his
thieving proletariat — Weitling is one of the few communists whom he knows by the
grace of Biuntschli.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

227

has the right to take from us what our own duty bids us sacrifice to it.... Self-sacrifice is
the only means of fulfilling one’s duty. Each one of us must sacrifice himself, always
and everywhere. He who out of egoism refuses to fulfil his duty of self-sacrifice must
be compelled to do it.’ — Thus Buchez cries out to all: sacrifice yourselves, sacrifice
yourselves! Think only of sacrificing yourselves! Does this not mean to misunderstand
human nature and trample it underfoot? Is not this a false view? We might almost
say — a childish , silly view” (Cabet, Refutation des doctrines de VAtelier, pp. 19, 20).

Cabet, further, on page 22, demonstrates to the republican
Buchez that he inevitably arrives at an “aristocracy of self-sacrifice”
with various ranks, and then asks ironically:

“What then becomes of devoument ? What remains of devoument if people sacrifice
themselves only in order to reach the highest pinnacles of hierarchy}... Such a system
might originate in the mind of a man who would like to become Pope or Car-
dinal— but in the minds of workers!!!” — “M. Buchez does not want labour to
become a pleasant diversion, nor that man should work for his own well-being and
create new pleasures for himself. He asserts ... ‘that man exists on earth only to fulfil a
calling, a duty (une fonction, un devoir)’. ‘No,’ he preaches to the communists, ‘man, this
great force, has not been created for himself (n'a point ete fait pour lui-meme).... That is a
crude idea. Man is a worker ( ouvrier ) in the world, he must accomplish the work
(oeuvre) which morality imposes on his activity, that is his duty.... Let us never lose sight
of the fact that we have to fulfil a high calling (une haute fonction) — a calling that began
with the first day of man’s existence and will come to an end only at the same time as
humanity.' — But who revealed all these fine things to [M.] Buchez? (Mais qui a revele
toutes ces belles choses a M. Buchez lui-meme” — which Stirner would have translated: How
is it that Buchez knows so well what man should do?) — "Du reste, comprenne qui
pourra.A — Buchez continues: ‘What! Man had to wait thousands of centuries in order
to learn from you communists that he was created for himself and has no other aim
than to live in all possible pleasures.... But one must not fall into such an error. One
must not forget that we are created in order to labour (faits pour travailler), to labour
always, and that the only thing we can demand is what is necessary for life (la suffisante
vie), i.e., the well-being that suffices for us to carry out our calling properly.
Everything that is beyond this boundary is absurd and dangerous.’ — But just prove it,
prove it! And do not be satisfied merely with delivering oracles like a prophet! At the
very outset you speak of thousands of centuries! And then, who asserts that people have
been waiting for us down all the centuries? But have people perhaps been waiting for
you with all your theories about devoument, devoir, nationalite frangaise, association
ouvriere ? ‘In conclusion,’ says Buchez, ‘we ask you not to take offence at what we have
said.’ — We also are polite Frenchmen and we, too, ask you not to take offence”
(p. 31). — ’“Believe us,’ says Buchez, ‘there exists a communaute which was created long
ago and of which you too are members.’ — Believe us, Buchez,” concludes Cabet,
“become a communist!”

“Self-sacrifice”, “duty”, “social obligation”, “the right of society”,
“the calling, the destiny of man”, “to be a worker the calling of
man”, “moral cause”, “workers’ association”, “creation of what is
indispensable for life” — are not these the same things for which
Saint Sancho reproaches the communists, and for the absence of
which the communists are reproached by M. Buchez, whose solemn

a “However, let him who can understand it.” — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

reproaches are ridiculed by Cabet? Do we not find here even
Stirner’s “hierarchy”?

Finally, Saint Sancho deals communism the coup de grace on
page 169, by uttering the following proposition:

“By taking away also property" (!) “the socialists do not take into account that its
continuance is safeguarded by the peculiarities of human beings. Are only money and
goods property, or is not every opinion also something that is mine, that belongs to
me? Hence , every opinion must be abolished or made impersonal.”

Or does Saint Sancho’s opinion, insofar as it does not become the
opinion of others as well, give him command over anything, even
over another’s opinion? By bringing into play against communism
the capital of his opinion, Saint Max again does nothing but advance
against it the oldest and most trivial bourgeois objections, and he
thinks he has said something new because for him, the “educated”
Berliner, these hackneyed ideas are new. Destutt de Tracy among,
and after, many others said the same thing much better approxi-
mately thirty years ago, and also later, in the book quoted below. For
example:

“Formal proceedings were instituted against property, and arguments were
brought forward for and against it, as though it depended on us to decide whether
property should or should not exist in the world; but this is based on a complete
misunderstanding of our nature” ( Traite de la volonte, Paris, 1826, p. 18).

And then M. Destutt de Tracy undertakes to prove that propriete,
individuality and personnalite are identical, that the “ego” [ moi ] also
includes “mine” [mien], and he finds as a natural basis for private
property that

“nature has endowed man with an inevitable and inalienable property, property in the
form of his own individuality” (p. 17). — The individual “clearly sees that this ego is the
exclusive owner of the body which it animates, the organs which it sets in motion, all
their capacities, all their forces, all the effects they produce, all their passions and
actions; for all this ends and begins with this ego, exists only through it, is set in motion
through its action; and no other person can make use of these same instruments or be
affected in the same way by them” (p. 16). “Property exists, if not precisely
everywhere that a sentient individual exists, at least wherever there is a conative
individual” (p. 19).

Having thus made private property and personality identical,
Destutt de Tracy with a play on the words propriete and propre a, like
“Stirner” with his play on the words Meinh and Meinung,c Eigentumd
and Eigenheit,e arrives at the following conclusion:

a One’s own. — Ed.

b My, mine. — Ed.

' Opinion, view. — Ed.

d Property. — Ed.

‘ Peculiarity. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

229

“It is, therefore, quite futile to argue about whether it would not be better for each
of us to have nothing of our own ( de discuter s’il ne vaudrait pas mieux que rien ne fut
propre a chacun de nous)... in any case it is equivalent to asking whether it would not be
desirable for us to be quite different from what we are, and even to examining
whether it would not be better for us not to exist at all” (p. 22).

“These are extremely popular”, now already traditional objections
to communism, and for that very reason “it is not surprising that
Stirner” repeats them.

When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the communists: by
abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed
proprietor, as a factory-owner, and your existence as workers, you
abolish my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for
me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent,
you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual. — When,
therefore, the bourgeois tells the communists: by abolishing my
existence as a bourgeois, you abolish my existence as an individual ;
when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an
individual, one must, at least, recognise his frankness and shameless-
ness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be
an individual only insofar as he is a bourgeois.

But when the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie come forward and
give a general expression to this assertion, when they equate the
bourgeois’s property with individuality in theory as well and want to
give a logical justification for this equation, then this nonsense
begins to become solemn and holy.

Above “Stirner” refuted the communist abolition of private
property by first transforming private property into “having” and
then declaring the verb “to have” an indispensable word, an eternal
truth, because even in communist society it could happen that Stirner
will “have” a stomach-ache. In exactly the same way here his
arguments regarding the impossibility of abolishing private property
depend on his transforming private property into the concept of
property, on exploiting the etymological connection between the
words Eigentum and eigert and declaring the word eigen an eternal
truth, because even under the communist system it could happen
that a stomach-ache will be eigen to him. All this theoretical nonsense,
which seeks refuge in etymology, would be impossible if the actual
private property that the communists want to abolish had not been
transformed into the abstract notion of “property”. This transfor-
mation, on the one hand, saves one the trouble of having to say

Own, peculiar. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

anything, or even merely to know anything, about actual private
property and, on the other hand, makes it easy to discover a
contradiction in communism, since after the abolition of ( actual )
property it is, of course, easy to discover all sorts of things in
communism which can be included in the concept “property”. In
reality, of course, the situation is just the reverse.* In reality 1 possess
private property only insofar as I have something vendible, whereas
what is peculiar to me [meine Eigenheit ] may not be vendible at all. My
frock-coat is private property for me only so long as I can barter,
pawn or sell it, so long [as it] is [marketable]. If it loses that feature, if
it becomes tattered, it can still have a number of features which make
it valuable for me, it may even become a feature of me and turn me
into a tatterdemalion. But no economist would think of classing it as
my private property, since it does not enable me to command any,
even the smallest, amount of other people’s labour. A lawyer, an
ideologist of private property, could perhaps still indulge in such
twaddle. Private property alienates [entfremdet] the individuality not
only of people but also of things. Land has nothing to do with rent
of land, the machine has nothing to do with profit. For the landed
proprietor, land has the significance only of rent of land; he leases
his plots of land and receives rent; this is a feature which land can
lose without losing a single one of its inherent features, without, for
example, losing any part of its fertility; it is a feature the extent and
even the existence of which depends on social relations which are
created and destroyed without the assistance of individual landed
proprietors. It is the same with machines. How little connection there
is between money, the most general form of property, and personal
peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each other was
already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorising petty
bourgeois:

Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;

Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

This yellow slave...

Will make the hoar leprosy adored...

This it is

That makes the wappened widow wed again;

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Actual private
property is something extremely general which has nothing at all to do with
individuality, which indeed directly nullifies individuality. Insofar as I am regarded as
a property-owner I am not regarded as an individual — a statement which is
corroborated every day by the marriages for money.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

231

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again...

Thou visible god,

That solder’st close impossibilities,

And mukest them kiss!3

In a word, rent of land, profit, etc., these actual forms of existence
of private property, are social relations corresponding to a definite
stage of production, and they are “individual” only so long as they
have not become fetters on the existing productive forces.

According to Destutt de Tracy, the majority of people, the
proletarians, must have lost all individuality long ago, although
nowadays it looks as if it was precisely among them that individuality
is most developed. For the bourgeois it is all the easier to prove on
the basis of his language the identity of commercial and individual,
or even universal, human relations, as this language itself is a
product of the bourgeoisie, and therefore both in actuality and in
language the relations of buying and selling have been made the
basis of all others. For example, propriete — property [ Eigentum ] and
characteristic feature [Eigenschaft]; property — possession [Eigentum]
and peculiarity [Eigentiimlichkeit]; “eigen” [“one’s own’’] — in the
commercial and in the individual sense; valeur, value, Wertb ;
commerce, Verkehrc; echange, exchange , Austausch d, etc., all of which
are used both for commercial relations and for characteristic
features and mutual relations of individuals as such. In the other
modern languages this is equally the case. If Saint Max seriously
applies himself to exploit this ambiguity, he may easily succeed in
making a brilliant series of new economic discoveries, without
knowing anything about political economy; for, indeed, his new
economic facts, which we shall take note of later, lie wholly within
this sphere of synonymy.

Our kindly, credulous Jacques takes the bourgeois play on the
words Eigentum [property] and Eigenschaft [characteristic feature] so
literally, in such holy earnest, that he even endeavours to behave like
a private property-owner in relation to his own features, as we shall
see later on.

Finally, on page 421, “Stirner” instructs communism that

“ actually it” (viz., communism) “does not attack property, but the alienation of
property”.

3 William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3. — Ed.
b Worth, value. — Ed.

c Intercourse, traffic, commerce, communication. — Ed.
d Exchange, barter, interchange. — Ed.

232

Karl Marx and Frederick Engel:

In this new revelation of his, Saint Max merely repeats an old
witticism already used repeatedly by, for example, the Saint-
Simonists. Cf ., for example, Legons sur V Industrie et les finances, Paris,
1832a, where, inter alia, it is stated:

“Property will not be abolished, but its form will be changed ... it will for the first
time become true personification ... it will for the first time acquire its real, individual
character” (pp. 42, 43).

Since this phrase, introduced by the French and particularly
enlarged on by Pierre Leroux, was seized on with great pleasure by
the German speculative socialists and used for further speculation,
and finally gave occasion for reactionary intrigues and sharp
practices — we shall not deal with it here where it says nothing, but
later on, in connection with true socialism.*5

Saint Sancho, [following the] example of Woeniger, whom
Reichardt [used], takes delight in turning the proletarians, [and
hence] also the communists, into “ragamuffins” . He defines his
“ragamuffin” on page 362 as a “man possessing only ideal wealth”.
If Stirner’s “ragamuffins” ever set up a vagabond kingdom, as the
Paris beggars did in the fifteenth century, then Saint Sancho will be
the vagabond king, for he is the “perfect” ragamuffin, a man
possessing not even ideal wealth and therefore living on the interest
from the capital of his opinion.

C. Humane Liberalism

After Saint Max has interpreted liberalism and communism as
imperfect modes of existence of philosophical “man”, and thereby
also of modern German philosophy in general (which he was
justified in doing, since in Germany not only liberalism but
communism as well was given a petty-bourgeois and at the same time
highflown ideological form), after this, it is easy for him to depict the
latest forms of German philosophy, what he has called “humane
liberalism”, as perfect liberalism and communism, and, at the same
time, as criticism of both of them.

With the aid of this holy construction we now get the following
three delightful transformations (cf. also “The Economy of the Old
Testament”):

1. The individual is not man, therefore he is of no value — absence
of personal will, ordinance — “whose name will be named”: “master-
less ” — political liberalism, which we have already dealt with above.

a The author of these lectures is Isaac Pereire. — Ed.
b See this volume, p. 468. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

233

2. The individual has nothing human, therefore no validity
attaches to mine and thine or property: “propertyless” — commu-
nism, which we have also already dealt with.

3. In criticism the individual should give place to man, now found
for the first time: “godless” =identity of “masterless” and “property-
less”— humane liberalism (pp. 180-81). — In a more detailed
exposition of this last negative unity, the unshakable orthodoxy of
Jacques reaches the following climax (p. 189):

“The egoism of property loses its last possession if even the words ‘my God’
become meaningless, for ” (a grand “for”!) “God only exists if he has at heart the
salvation of each individual, just as the latter seeks his salvation in God.”

According to this, the French bourgeois would only “lose” his
“last” “property” if the word adieu were banished from the
language. In complete accord with the preceding construction,
property in God, holy property in heaven, the property of fantasy,
the fantasy of property, are here declared to be supreme property
and the last sheet-anchor of property.

From these three illusions about liberalism, communism and
German philosophy, he now concocts his new — and, thanks be to the
“holy”, this time the last — transition to the “ego”. Before following
him in this, let us once more glance at his last “arduous life struggle”
with “humane liberalism”.

After our worthy Sancho in his new role of caballero andante ,a and
in fact as caballero de la tristisima figura,h has traversed the whole of
history, everywhere battling and “blowing down” spirits and
spectres, “dragons and ostriches, satyrs and hobgoblins, wild beasts
of the desert and vultures, bitterns and hedgehogs” (cf. Isaiah, 34:
11-14), how happy he must now be, after his wanderings through all
these different lands, to come at last to his island of Barataria,74 to
“the land” as such, where “Man” goes about in puris naturalibuscl Let
us once more recall his great thesis, the dogma imposed on him, on
which his whole construction of history rests, to the effect that:

“the truths which arise from the concept of man are revered as revelations of precisely
this concept and regarded as holy”; “the revelations of this holy concept”, even “with
the abolition of many a truth manifested by means of this concept, are not deprived of
their holiness” (p. 51).

We need hardly repeat what we have already proved to our holy
author in respect of all his examples, namely, that empirical

d Knight-errant. — Ed.

Knight of the most rueful countenance. — Ed.
1 In the pure natural state. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

relations, created by real people in their real intercourse and not at
all by the holy concept of man, are afterwards interpreted,
portrayed, imagined, consolidated and justified by people as a
revelation of the concept “man”. One may also recall his hierarchy.
And now on to humane liberalism.

On page 44, where Saint Max “in brief” “contrasts Feuerbach’s
[theological] view with our view”, at first nothing but phrases are
advanced against Feuerbach. As we already saw in regard to the
manufacture of spirits, where “Sdrner” places his stomach among
the stars (the third Dioscuros, a patron saint and protector against
seasickness/5), because he and his stomach are “different names for
totally different things” (p. 42), so, here, too, essence [ Weserf ]
appears first of all as an existing thing, and “so it is now said” (p. 44):

“The supreme being is, indeed, the essence of man, but precisely because it is his
essence, and not man himself, it makes absolutely no difference whether we see this essence
outside man and perceive it as ‘God’ or find it in man and call it the ‘essence of man’ or
‘Man’. I am neither God nor Man, neither the supreme being nor my essence — and,
therefore, in the main, it makes no difference whether I think of this essence as inside
me or outside me.”

Hence, the “essence of man” is presupposed here as an existing
thing, it is the “supreme being”, it is not the “ego”, and, instead of
saying something about “essence”, Saint Max restricts himself to the
simple statement that it makes “no difference” “whether I think of it
as inside me or outside me”, in this locality or in that. That this
indifference to essence is no mere carelessness of style is already
evident from the fact that he himself makes the distinction between
essential and inessential and that with him even “the noble essence of
egoism” finds a place (p. 71). Incidentally everything the German
theoreticians have said so far about essence and non-essence is to be
found already far better said by Hegel in his Logik.

We found the boundless orthodoxy of “Stirner” with regard to the
illusions of German philosophy expressed in concentrated form in
the fact that he constantly foists “Man” on history as the sole dramatis
persona and believes that “Man” has made history. Now we shall find
the same thing recurring in connection with Feuerbach, whose
illusions “Stirner” faithfully accepts in order to build further on
their foundation.

Page 77: “In general Feuerbach only transposes subject and predicate, giving
preference to the latter. But since he says himself: ‘Love is not holy because it is a
predicate of God (nor have people ever held it to be holy for that reason) but it is a
predicate of God because it is divine by and for itself,’ he was able to conclude that the

a Wesen can mean either essence or being. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

235

struggle had to be begun against the predicates themselves, against love and
everything holy. How could he hope to turn people away from God, once he had left
them the divine ? And if, as Feuerbach says, the main thing for people has never been
God, but only his predicates, he could after all have allowed them to keep this tinsel,
since the puppet, the real kernel, still remained.”

Since, therefore, Feuerbach “ himself ’ says this, it is reason enough
for Jacques le bonhomme to believe him that people have esteemed
love because it is “divine by and for itself” . If precisely the opposite
of what Feuerbach says took place — and we “make bold to say this”
( Wigand , p. 157) — if neither God nor his predicates have ever been
the main thing for people, if this itself is only a religious illusion of
German theory — it means that the very same thing has happened to
our Sancho as happened to him before in Cervantes, when four
stumps were put under his saddle while he slept and his ass was led
away from under him.

Relying on these statements of Feuerbach, Sancho starts a battle
which was likewise already anticipated by Cervantes in the
nineteenth chapter, where the ingenioso hidalgo fights against the
predicates, the mummers, while they are carrying the corpse of the
world to the grave and who, entangled in their robes and shrouds,
are unable to move and so make it easy for our hidalgo to overturn
them with his lance and give them a thorough thrashing. The last
attempt to exploit further the criticism of religion as an independent
sphere (a criticism which has been flogged to the point of
exhaustion), to remain within the premises of German theory and
yet to appear to be going beyond them, and to cook from this bone,
gnawed away to the last fibres, a thin Rumford beggar’s broth76 [for
“the] book” — this last attempt consisted in attacking material
relations, not in their actual form, and not even in the form of the
mundane illusions of those who are practically involved in the
present-day world, but in the heavenly extract of their mundane
form as predicates, as emanations from God, as angels. Thus, the
heavenly kingdom was now repopulated and abundant new material
created for the old method of exploitation of this heavenly kingdom.
Thus, the struggle against religious illusions, against God, was again
substituted for the real struggle. Saint Bruno, who earns his bread by
theology, in his “arduous life struggle” against substance makes the
same attempt pro aris et foci? as a theologian to go beyond the limits
of theology. His “substance” is nothing but the predicates of God
united under one name; with the exception of personality, which
he reserves for himself — these predicates of God are again nothing

For home and hearth. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

but deified names for the ideas of people about their definite,
empirical relations, ideas which subsequently they hypocritically
retain because of practical considerations. With the theoretical
equipment inherited from Hegel it is, of course, not possible even to
understand the empirical, material attitude of these people. Owing
to the fact that Feuerbach showed the religious world as an illusion of
the earthly world — a world which in his writing appears merely as a
phrase — German theory too was confronted with the question which
he left unanswered: how did it come about that people “got” these
illusions “into their heads”? Even for the German theoreticians this
question paved the way to the materialistic view of the world, a view
which is not without premises, but which empirically observes the
actual material premises as such and for that reason is, for the
first time, actually a critical view of the world. This path was already
indicated in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher — in the Einleitung
zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage ,a
But since at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology, the
traditionally occurring philosophical expressions such as “human
essence”, “species”, etc., gave the German theoreticians the desired
reason for misunderstanding the real trend of thought and believing
that here again it was a question merely of giving a new turn to their
worn-out theoretical garment — just as Dr. Arnold Ruge, the Dottore
Graziano of German philosophy, imagined that he could continue as
before to wave his clumsy arms about and display his pedantic-farci-
cal mask. One has to “leave philosophy aside” ( Wigand , p. 187, cf.
Hess, Die letzten Philosophen, p. 8), one has to leap out of it and devote
oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there
exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown, of
course, to the philosophers. When, after that, one again encounters
people like Krummacher or “Sftrner”, one finds that one has long ago
left them “behind” and below. Philosophy and the study of the
actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and
sexual love. Saint Sancho, who in spite of his absence of
thought — which was noted by us patiently and by him emphatical-
ly— remains within the world of pure thoughts, can, of course, save
himself from it only by means of a moral postulate, the postulate of
“ thoughtlessness ” (p. 196 of “the book”). He is a bourgeois who saves
himself in the face of commerce by the banqueroute cochenne ,77
whereby, of course, he becomes not a proletarian, but an impecu-
nious, bankrupt bourgeois. He does not become a man of the world,
but a bankrupt philosopher without thoughts.

a See present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 146-87. — Ed.

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The predicates of God handed down from Feuerbach as real
forces over people, as hierarchs, are the monstrosity which is
substituted for the empirical world and which “Stirner” finds in
existence. So heavily does Stirner’s entire “peculiarity” depend
merely on “prompting”. If “Stirner” (see also p. 63) reproaches
Feuerbach for reaching no result because he turns the predicate into
the subject and vice versa, he himself is far less capable of arriving at
anything, [for] he faithfully accepts these Feuerbachian predicates,
transformed into subjects, as real personalities ruling [the world], he
faithfully accepts these phrases about relations as actual relations,
attaching the predicate “holy” to them, transforming this predicate into
a subject, the “holy”, i.e., doing exactly the same as that for which he
reproaches Feuerbach. And so, after he has thus completely got rid
of the definite content that was the matter at issue, he begins his
struggle — i.e., his “antipathy” — against this “holy”, which, of
course, always remains the same. Feuerbach has still the conscious-
ness “that for him it is ‘only a matter of destroying an illusion’” — and
it is this with which Saint Max reproaches him (p. 77 of “the
book”) — although Feuerbach still attaches much too great impor-
tance to the struggle against this illusion. In “Stirner” even this
consciousness has “all gone”, he actually believes in the domination
of the abstract ideas of ideology in the modern world; he believes
that in his struggle against “predicates”, against concepts, he is no
longer attacking an illusion, but the real forces that rule the world.
Hence his manner of turning everything upside-down, hence the
immense credulity with which he takes at their face value all the
sanctimonious illusions, all the hypocritical asseverations of the
bourgeoisie. How little, incidentally, the “puppet” is the “real
kernel” of the “tinsel”, and how lame this beautiful analogy is, can
best be seen from “Stirner’s” own “puppet” — “the book”, which
contains no “kernel”, whether “real” or not “real”, and where even
the little that there is in its 491 pages scarcely deserves the name
“tinsel”. — If, however, we must find some sort of “kernel” in it,
then that kernel is the German petty bourgeois.

Incidentally, as regards the source of Saint Max’s hatred of
“predicates”, he himself gives an extremely naive disclosure in the
“Apologetic Commentary”. He quotes the following passage from
Das Wesen des Christenthums (p. 31): “A true atheist is only one for
whom the predicates of the divine being, e.g., love, wisdom, justice
are nothing, but not one for whom only the subject of these predicates
is nothing” — and then he exclaims triumphantly: “ Does this not hold
good for Stirner ?” — “Here is wisdom.” In the above passage Saint
Max found a hint as to how one should start in order to go “ farthest

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of all". He believes Feuerbach that the above passage reveals
the “essence” of the “ true atheist", and lets Feuerbach set him the
“task” of becoming a “true atheist”. The “unique” is “the true
atheist" .

Even more credulously than in relation to Feuerbach does he
“handle” matters in relation to Saint Bruno or “criticism”. We shall
gradually see all the things that he allows “criticism” to impose on
him, how he puts himself under its police surveillance, how it dictates
his mode of life, his “calling”. For the time being it suffices to
mention as an example of his faith in criticism that on page 1 86 he
treats “Criticism” and the “Mass” as two persons fighting against
each other and “striving to free themselves from egoism”, and
on page 187 he “accepts” both “for what they ... give themselves out
to be".

With the struggle against humane liberalism, the long struggle of
the Old Testament, when man was a school-master of the unique,
comes to an end; the time is fulfilled, and the gospel of grace and joy
is ushered in for sinful humanity.

The struggle over “man” is the fulfilment of the word, as written
in the twenty-first chapter of Cervantes, which deals with “the high
adventure and rich prize of Mambrino’s helmet”. Our Sancho, who
in everything imitates his former lord and present servant, “has
sworn to win Mambrino’s helmet” — Man — for himself. After having
during his various “campaigns”3 sought in vain to find the
longed-for helmet among the ancients and moderns, liberals and
communists, “he caught sight of a man on a horse carrying
something on his head which shone like gold”. And he said to Don
Quixote-Szeliga: “If I am not mistaken, there is someone

approaching us bearing on his head that helmet of Mambrino, about
which I swore the oath you know of.” “Take good care of what you
say, your worship, and even greater care of what you do,” replied
Don Quixote, who by now has become wiser. “Tell me, can you not
see that knight coming towards us on a dapple-grey steed with a
gold helmet on his head?” — “What I see and perceive,” replies Don
Quixote, “is nothing but a man on a grey ass like yours with
something glittering on his head.” — “Why, that is Mambrino’s
helmet,” says Sancho.

3 In the German original the word Ausziige is used which can mean departures,
campaigns or extracts, abstracts. — Ed.

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Meanwhile, at a gentle trot there approaches them Bruno, the holy
barber, on his small ass, criticism, with his barber’s basin on his head;
Saint Sancho sets on him lance in hand. Saint Bruno jumps from his
ass, drops the basin (for which reason we saw him here at the Council
without the basin) and rushes off across country, “for he is the Critic
himself”. Saint Sancho with great joy picks up the helmet of
Mambrino, and to Don Quixote’s remark that it looks exactly like a
barber’s basin he replies: “This famous, enchanted helmet, which
has become ‘ghostly’, undoubtedly fell into the hands of a man who
was unable to appreciate its worth, and so he melted down one half
of it and hammered out the other half in such a way that, as you
say, it appears to be a barber’s basin; in any case, whatever it may
look like to the vulgar eye, for me, since I know its value, that is a
matter of indifference.”

“The second splendour, the second property, has now been won!”

Now that he has gained his helmet, “man", he puts himself in
opposition to him, behaves towards him as towards his “most
irreconcilable enemy” and declares outright to him (why, we shall see
later) that he (Saint Sancho) is not “man”, but an “unhuman being,
the inhuman”. In the guise of this “inhuman”, he now moves to
Sierra-Morena, in order to prepare himself by acts of penitence for
the splendour of the New Testament. There he strips himself “stark
naked” (p. 1 84) in order to achieve his peculiarity and surpass what his
predecessor in Cervantes does in chapter twenty-five:

“And hurriedly stripping off his breeches, he stood in his skin and his shirt. And
then, without more ado, he took two goat leaps into the air turning head over heels,
thereby revealing such things as caused his trusty armour-bearer to turn Rosinante
aside, so as not to see them.”

The “inhuman” far surpasses its mundane prototype. It “ resolutely
turns its back on itself and thus also turns away from the disquieting
critic”, and “leaves him behind”. The “ inhuman ” then enters into an
argument with criticism that has been “left behind”; it “despises it-
self”, it “conceives itself in comparison with another”, it “commands
God”, it “seeks its better self outside itself”, it does penance for not yet
being unique, it declares itself to be the unique, “the egoistical and the
unique ” — although it was hardly necessary for it to state this after
having resolutely turned its back on itself. The “inhuman” has
accomplished all this by its own efforts (see Pfister, Geschichte der
Teutschen ) and now, purified and triumphant, it rides on its ass into
the kingdom of the unique.

End of the Old Testament

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THE NEW TESTAMENT: “EGO”78
1. The Economy of the New Testament

Whereas in the Old Testament the object of our edification was
“unique” logic in the framework of the past, we are now confronted
by the present time in the framework of “unique” logic. We have
already thrown sufficient light on the “unique” in his manifold
antediluvian “refractions” — as man, Caucasian Caucasian, perfect
Christian, truth of humane liberalism, negative unity of realism and
idealism, etc., etc. Along with the historical construction of the
“ego”, the “ego” itself also collapses. This “ego”, the end of the
historical construction, is no “corporeal” ego, carnally procreated by
man and woman, which needs no construction in order to exist; it is
an “ego” spiritually created by two categories, “idealism” and
“realism,” a merely conceptual existence.

The New Testament, which has already been dissolved together
with its premise, the Old Testament, possesses a domestic
economy that is literally as wisely designed as that of the Old, namely
the same “with various transformations”, as can be seen from the
following table:

I. Peculiarity= the ancients, child, Negro, etc., in their truth, i.e.,
development from the “world of things” to one’s “own” outlook
and taking possession of this world. Among the ancients this led
to riddance of the world, among the moderns — riddance of spirit,
among the liberals — riddance of the individual, among the com-
munists— riddance of property, among the • humane [liber-
als]— riddance of God : hence it led in general to the category of
riddance (freedom) as the goal. The negated category of riddance
is peculiarity, which of course has no other content than this rid-
dance. Peculiarity is the philosophically constructed quality of all
the qualities of Stirner’s individual.

II. The owner — as such Stirner has penetrated beyond the un-
truthfulness of the world of things and the world of spirit; hence
the moderns, the phase of Christianity within the logical develop-
ment: youth, Mongol. — Just as the moderns divide into the triply
determined free ones, so the owner falls into three further deter-
mi nations:

1. My power, corresponding to political liberalism, where the
truth of right is brought to light and right as the power of “man”
is resolved in power as the right of the “ego”. The struggle
against the state as such.

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2. My intercourse, corresponding to communism, whereby the
truth of society is brought to light and society (in its forms of
prison society, family, state, bourgeois society, etc.) as inter-
course mediated by “man” is resolved in the intercourse of
the “ego”.

3. My self-enjoyment, corresponding to critical, humane liber-
alism, in which the truth of criticism, the consumption, dissolu-
tion and truth of absolute self-consciousness, comes to light as
self-consumption, and criticism as dissolution in the interests
of man is transformed into dissolution in the interests of the
“ego”.

THe peculiarity of the individuals was resolved, as we have
seen, in the universal category of peculiarity, which was the
negation of riddance, of freedom in general. A description of
the special qualities of the individual, therefore, can again only
consist in the negation of this “freedom” in its three “refrac-
tions”; each of these negative freedoms is now converted by its
negation into a positive quality. Obviously, just as in the Old
Testament riddance of the world of things and the world of
thoughts was already regarded as the acquisition of both these
worlds, so here also it is a matter of course that this peculiarity or
acquisition of things and thoughts is in its turn represented as
perfect riddance.

The “ego” with its property, its world, consisting of the
qualities just “pointed out”, is owner. As self-enjoying and
self-consuming, it is the “ego” raised to the second power, the
owner of the owner, it being as much rid of the owner as the
owner belongs to it; the result is “absolute negativity” in its dual
determination as indifference, “unconcern”3 and negative
relation to itself, the owner. Its property in respect of the world
and its riddance of the world is now transformed into this
negative relation to itself, into this self-dissolution and self-
ownership of the owner. The ego, thus determined, is —

III. The unique, who again, therefore, has no other content
than that of owner plus the philosophical determination of the
“negative relation to himself”. The profound Jacques pretends
that there is nothing to say about this unique, because it is a corpo-
real, not constructed individual. But the matter here is rather the
same as in the case of Hegel’s absolute idea at the end of the Logik
and of absolute personality at the end of the Encyklopadie, about
which there is likewise nothing to say because the construction
contains everything that can be said about such constructed per-

3 In the manuscript the Berlin dialect form Jleichjiiltigkeit (unconcern) is used. — Ed.

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sonalities. Hegel knows this and does not mind admitting it,
whereas Stirner hypocritically maintains that his “unique” is also
something different from the constructed unique alone, but
something that cannot be expressed, viz., a corporeal individual.

This hypocritical appearance vanishes if the thing is reversed,
if the unique is defined as owner, and it is said of the owner that
he has the universal category of peculiarity as his universal de-
termination. This not only says everything that is “ sayable ” about
the unique, but also what he is in general — minus the fantasy of
Jacques le bonhomme about him.

“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of the unique! How
incomprehensible are his thoughts, and his ways past finding out!”3

“Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him!”
(Job 26: 14.)

2. The Phenomenology of the Egoist in Agreement
with Himself, or the Theory of Justification

As we have already seen in “The Economy of the Old Testament”
and afterwards, Saint Sancho’s true egoist in agreement with himself
must on no account be confused with the trivial, everyday egoist, the
“egoist in the ordinary sense”. Rather he has as his presupposition both
this latter (the one in thrall to the world of things, child, Negro,
ancient, etc.) and the selfless egoist (the one in thrall to the world of
thoughts, youth, Mongol, modern, etc.). It is, however, part of the
nature of the secrets of the unique that this antithesis and the
negative unity which follows from it — the “ egoist in agreement with
himself ’ — can be examined only now, in the New Testament.

Since Saint Max wishes to present the “true egoist” as something
quite new, as the goal of all preceding history, he must, on the one
hand, prove to the selfless, the advocates of devoument, that they are
egoists against their will, and he must prove to the egoists in the
ordinary sense that they are selfless, that they are not true, holy,
egoists. — Let us begin with the first, with the selfless.

We have already seen countless times that in the world of Jacques
le bonhomme everyone is obsessed by the holy. “Nevertheless it
makes a difference” whether “one is educated or uneducated”. The
educated, who are occupied with pure thought, confront us here as
“obsessed” by the holy par excellence. They are the “selfless” in their
practical guise.

3 Romans 11:33 (paraphrased). — Ed.

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“Who then is selfless? Completely” (!) “most” (!!) "likely” (!!!) “he who stakes
everything else on one thing, one aim, one purpose, one passion.... He is ruled
by a passion to which he sacrifices all others. And are these selfless not selfish,
perhaps? Since they possess only a single ruling passion, they are concerned only with a
single satisfaction, but the more ardently on that account. All their deeds and actions
are egoistic, but it is a one-sided, concealed, narrow egoism ; it is — obsession” (p. 99).

Hence, according to Saint Sancho, they possess only a single ruling
passion; ought they to be concerned also with the passions which not
they, but others possess, in order to rise to an all-round, unconcealed,
unrestricted egoism, in order to correspond to this alien scale of
“holy” egoism?

In this passage are incidentally introduced also the “miser” and
the “ pleasure-seeker ” (probably because Stirner thinks that he seeks
“ pleasure ” as such, holy pleasure, and not all sorts of real pleasures),
as also “Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on” (p.100) as
examples of “selfless, obsessed egoists”. “From a certain moral point
of view it is argued” (i.e., our holy “egoist in agreement with
himself” argues from his own point of view in extreme disagreement
with himself) “approximately as follows”:

“But if I sacrifice other passions to one passion, I still do not thereby sacrifice myself
to this passion, and I do not sacrifice anything thanks to which I am truly I myself”
(p. 386).

Saint Max is compelled by these two propositions “in disagreement
with each other” to make the “paltry” distinction that one may well
sacrifice six “for example”, or seven, “and so on”, passions to a
single other passion without ceasing to be “truly I myself”, but by no
means ten passions, or a still greater number. Of course, neither
Robespierre nor Saint-Just was “ truly I myself”, just as neither
was truly “man”, but they were truly Robespierre and Saint-Just,
those unique, incomparable individuals.

The trick of proving to the “selfless” that they are egoists is an old
dodge, sufficiently exploited already by Helvetius and Bentham.
Saint Sancho’s “own” trick consists in the transformation of “egoists
in the ordinary sense”, the bourgeois, into non-egoists. Helvetius
and Bentham, at any rate, prove to the bourgeois that by their
narrow-mindedness they in practice harm themselves, but Saint Max’s
“own” trick consists in proving that they do not correspond to the
“ideal”, the “concept”, the “essence”, the “calling”, etc., of the egoist
and that their attitude towards themselves is not that of absolute
negation. Here again he has in mind only his German petty
bourgeois. Let us point out, incidentally, that whereas on page 99
our saint makes the “miser” figure as a “selfless egoist”, on page 78,

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on the other hand, the “avaricious one” is included among “egoists
in the ordinary sense”, among the “impure, unholy”.

This second class of the hitherto existing egoists is defined on
page 99 as follows:

“These people” (the bourgeois) “are therefore not selfless, not inspired, not ideal,
not consistent, not enthusiasts; they are egoists in the ordinary sense, selfish people,
thinking of their own advantage, sober, calculating, etc.”

Since “the book” is not all of a piece, we have already had
occasion, in connection with “whimsy” and “political liberalism”, to
see how Stirner achieves the trick of transforming the bourgeois into
non-egoists, chiefly owing to his great ignorance of real people and
conditions. This same ignorance serves him here as a lever.

“This” (i.e., Stirner’s fantasy about unselfishness) “is repugnant to the stubborn
brain of worldly man but for thousands of years he at least succumbed so far that he
had to bend his obstinate neck and worship higher powers” (p. 104). The egoists in the
ordinary sense “behave half clerically and half in a worldly way, they serve both God
and Mammon” (p. 105).

We learn on page 78: “The Mammon of heaven and the God of
the world both demand precisely the same degree of self-denial" ,
hence it is impossible to understand how self-denial for Mammon
and self-denial for God can be opposed to each other as “worldly”
and “clerical”.

On page 105-106, Jacques le bonhomme asks himself:

“How does it happen, then, that the egoism of those who assert their personal
interest nevertheless constantly succumbs to a clerical or school-masterly, i.e., an ideal,
interest?”

(Here, one must in passing “point out” that in this passage the
bourgeois are depicted as representatives of personal interests.) It
happens because:

“Their personality seems to them too small, too unimportant — as indeed it is— to
lay claim to everything and be able to assert itself fully. A sure sign of this is the
fact that they divide themselves into two persons, an eternal and a temporal; on
Sundays they take care of the eternal aspect and on weekdays the temporal. They have
the priest within them, therefore they cannot get rid of him.”

Sancho experiences some scruples here; he asks anxiously whether
“the same thing will happen” to peculiarity, the egoism in the
extraordinary sense.

We shall see that it is not without grounds that this anxious
question is asked. Before the cock has crowed twice, Saint Jacob
(Jacques le bonhomme) will have “ denied ” himself thrice.3

Cf. Mark 14 : 30. — Ed.

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245

He discovers to his great displeasure that the two sides prominent-
ly appearing in history, the private interest of individuals and the
so-called general interest, always accompany each other. As usual, he
discovers this in a false form, in its holy form, from the aspect of
ideal interests, of the holy, of illusion. He asks: how is it that the
ordinary egoists, the representatives of personal interests, are at the
same time dominated by general interests, by school-masters, by the
hierarchy? His reply to the question is to the effect that the
bourgeois, etc., “seem to themselves too small”, and he discovers a
“sure sign” of this in the fact that they behave in a religious way, i.e.,
that their personality is divided into a temporal and an eternal one,
that is to say, he explains their religious behaviour by their religious
behaviour, after first transforming the struggle between general and
personal interests into a mirror image of the struggle, into a simple
reflection inside religious fantasy.

How the matter stands as regards the domination of the ideal, see
above in the section on hierarchy.

If Sancho’ s question is translated from its highflown form into
everyday language, then “it now reads”:

How is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of
individuals, into class interests, into common interests which acquire
independent existence in relation to the individual persons, and in
their independence assume the form of general interests? How is it
that as such they come into contradiction with the actual individuals
and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general
interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as
religious, holy interests? How is it that in this process of private
interests acquiring independent existence as class interests the
personal behaviour of the individual is bound to be objectified
[sich versachlichen], estranged [sich entfremden ], and at the same time
exists as a power independent of him and without him, created
by intercourse, and is transformed into social relations, into a series
of powers which determine and subordinate the individual, and
which, therefore, appear in the imagination as “holy” powers?
Had Sancho understood the fact that within the framework of
definite modes of production, which, of course, are not dependent
on the will, alien [fremde] practical forces, which are independent
not only of isolated individuals but even of all of them together,
always come to stand above people — then he could be fairly
indifferent as to whether this fact is presented in a religious
form or distorted in the fancy of the egoist, above whom everything
is placed in imagination, in such a way that he places nothing above
himself. Sancho would then have descended from the realm of

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speculation into the realm of reality, from what people fancy to what
they actually are, from what they imagine to how they act and are
bound to act in definite circumstances. What seems to him a product
of thought, he would have understood to be a product of life. He
would not then have arrived at the absurdity worthy of him — of
explaining the division between personal and general interests by
saying that people imagine this division also in a religious way and
seem to themselves to be such and such, which is, however, only
another word for “imagining”.

Incidentally, even in the banal, petty-bourgeois German form in
which Sancho perceives the contradiction of personal and general
interests, he should have realised that individuals have always started
out from themselves, and could not do otherwise, and that therefore
the two aspects he noted are aspects of the personal development of
individuals; both are equally engendered by the empirical conditions
under which the individuals live, both are only expressions of one and
the same personal development of people and are therefore only in
seeming contradiction to each other. As regards the position — deter-
mined by the special circumstances of development and by division
of labour — which falls to the lot of the given individual, whether he
represents to a greater extent one or the other aspect of the
antithesis, whether he appears more as an egoist or more as
selfless — that was a quite subordinate question, which could only
acquire any interest at all if it were raised in definite epochs of
history in relation to definite individuals. Otherwise this question
could only lead to morally false, charlatan phrases. But as a
dogmatist Sancho falls into error here and finds no other way out
than by declaring that the Sancho Panzas and Don Quixotes are born
such, and that then the Don Quixotes stuff all kinds of nonsense into
the heads of the Sanchos; as a dogmatist he seizes on one aspect,
conceived in a school-masterly manner, declares it to be characteris-
tic of individuals as such, and expresses his aversion to the other
aspect. Therefore, too, as a dogmatist, the other aspect appears to
him partly as a mere state of mind , devoument, partly as a mere
“ principle ”, and not as a relation necessarily arising from the
preceding natural mode of life of individuals. One has, therefore,
only to “get this principle out of one’s head”, although, according to
Sancho’s ideology, it creates all kinds of empirical things. Thus, for
example, on page 180 “social life, all sociability, all fraternity and all
that ... was created by the life principle3 or social principle”. It is
better the other way round: life created the principle.

Stirner has “love principle”. — Ed.

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Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the
communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness
to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically
either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they
rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of
itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does
so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love
one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very
well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite
circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals.
Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes,
and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Rugej repeats after him (for
which Saint Max calls him “an unusually cunning and politic
mind”, Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the “private individual” for
the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the
imagination concerning which both of them could already have
found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbiicher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have
time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by
the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the
“general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “pri-
vate persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming
one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is
constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in
relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an
independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice
constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question
of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction,
but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding
materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disap-
pearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also
disappears.

Thus we see how the “egoist in agreement with himself” as op-
posed to the “egoist in the ordinary sense” and the “selfless egoist”,
is based from the outset on an illusion about both of these and about
the real relations of real people. The representative of personal
interests is merely an “egoist in the ordinary sense” because of his
necessary contradiction to communal interests which, within the
existing mode of production and intercourse, are given an
independent existence as general interests and are conceived and
vindicated in the form of ideal interests. The representative of the
interests of the community is merely “selfless” because of his
opposition to personal interests, fixed as private interests, and

10—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

because the interests of the community are defined as general and
ideal interests.

Both the “selfless egoist” and the “egoist in the ordinary sense”
coincide, in the final analysis, in self-denial.

Page 78: “Thus, self-denial is common to both the holy and unholy, the pure and
impure: the impure denies all better feelings, all shame, even natural timidity, and
follows only the desire which rules him. The pure renounces his natural relation to the
world.... Impelled by the thirst for money, the avaricious person denies all promptings
of conscience, all sense of honour, all soft-heartedness and pity; he is blind to all
consideration, his desire drives him on. The holy person acts similarly: he makes
himself a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world, he is ‘hard-hearted’ and ‘severely
just’, for he is carried away by his longing.’’

The “avaricious man”, shown here as an impure, unholy egoist,
hence as an egoist in the ordinary sense, is nothing but a figure on
whom moral readers for children and novels dilate, but that actually
occurs only as an exception, and is by no means the representative of
the avaricious bourgeois. The latter, on the contrary, have no need
to deny the “promptings of conscience”, “the sense of honour”,
etc., or to restrict themselves to the one passion of avarice alone. On
the contrary, their avarice engenders a series of other passions —
political, etc. — the satisfaction of which the bourgeois on no account
sacrifice. Without going more deeply into this matter, let us at once
turn to Stirner’s “self-deniai”.

For the self which denies itself, Saint Max here substitutes a
different self which exists only in Saint Max’s imagination. He makes
the “impure” sacrifice general qualities such as “better feelings”,
“shame”, “timidity”, “sense of honour”, etc., and does not at all ask
whether the impure actually possesses these properties. As if the
“impure” is necessarily bound to possess all these qualities! But even
if the “impure” did possess all of them, the sacrifice of these qualities
would still be no self-denial, but only confirm the fact — which has to
be justified even in morality “in agreement with itself” — that for the
sake of one passion several others are sacrificed. And, finally,
according to this theory, everything that Sancho does or does not do
is “self-denial”. He may or may not act in a particular manner [...].*

* [There is a gap here. An extant page, which has been crossed out and greatly
damaged, contains the following:] he is an egoist, his own self-denial. If he pursues an
interest he denies the indifference to this interest, if he does something he denies
idleness. Nothing is easier [...] for Sancho than to prove to the " egoist in the ordinary
sense” — his stumbling-block — that he always denies himself, because he always denies
the opposite of what he does, and never denies his real interest.

In accordance with his theory of self-denial Sancho can exclaim on page 80: “Is
perhaps unselfishness unreal and non-existent? On the contrary, nothing is more
common!”

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249

Although* on* page 420 Saint Max now says:

“Over the portals of our [epoch] are written not the words ... ‘know thyself, [but]
‘turn yourself to account’” [Verwerte Dich]

(here our school-master again transforms the actual turning to
account which he finds in existence into a moral precept about
turning to account), nevertheless [for the] “egoist in the ordinary
[sense’ instead of for] the former “selfless egoist”, “the [Apollonic”
maxim 8,1 should read:

“Only know yourselves], only know what [you] are in reality and give up vour
foolish endeavour to be something different from what you are!” “For”: “This
leads to the phenomenon of deceived egoism, in which I satisfy not myself, but]
only one [of my desires, e.] g., the [thirst for] happiness. [ — All] your deeds and
[actions are secret], concealed ... [egoism,] unconscious egoism, [but] for that very reason
not egoism, but slavery, service, self-denial. You are egoists and at the same time not
egoists, inasmuch as you deny egoism ” (p. 217).

“No sheep, no dog, endeavours to become a real” egoist (p. 443);
“no animal” calls to the others: “Only know yourselves, only know

We are really very happy [about the “unselfishness”] of the consciousness of the
German petty [bourgeois]....

He immediately gives a good example of this unselfishness by [adducing]
Orphanage-F[rancke, ‘ O’Connell, Saint Boniface, Robespierre, Theodor Korner...].

O’Connell [...], every [child] in Britain knows this. Only in Germany, and
particularly in Berlin, is it still possible to believe that O’Connell is “unselfish”.
O’Connell, who “tirelessly works” to place his illegitimate children and to enlarge his
fortune, who has not for love exchanged his lucrative legal practice (£10,000 per
annum) for the even more lucrative job of an agitator (£20,000-30,000 per annum)
(especially lucrative in Ireland, where he has no competition): O’Connell who, acting
as middleman,'1 “hard-heartedly” exploits the Irish peasants making them live with
their pigs while he. King Dan, holds court in princely style in his paiace in Merrion
Square and at the same time laments continually over the misery of these peasants,
“for he is carried away bv his longing”; O’Connell, who always pushes the movement
just as far as is necessary to secure his national tribute0 and his position as chief, and
who every year after collecting the tribute gives up all agitation in order to pamper
himself on his estate at Derrynane. Because of his legal charlatanism carried on over
many years and his exceedingly brazen exploitation of every movement in which he
participated, O’Connell is regarded with contempt even by the English bourgeoisie,
despite his usefulness.

It is moreover obvious that Saint Max, the discoverer of true egoism, is strongly
interested in proving that unselfishness has hitherto ruled the world. Therefore he
puts forward the great proposition ( Wigand , p. 165) that the world was “not egoistic
for millennia”. At most he admits that from time to time the “egoist” appeared as
Stirner's forerunner and “ruined nations”.

* [Marx made the following note at the beginning of this page:] III. Consciousness.

a The word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

These two words are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

what you are in reality”. — “It is your nature to be” egoistical, “you
are” egoistical “natures, i. e.”, egoists. “But precisely because you* are
that already, you have no need to become so” (ibid.). To what you
are belongs also your consciousness, and since you are egoists you
possess also the consciousness corresponding to your egoism, and
therefore there is no reason at all for paying the slightest heed
to Sdrner’s moral preaching to look into your heart and do penance.

Here again Stirner exploits the old philosophical device to which
we shall return later. The philosopher does not say directly: You are
not people. [He says:] You have always been people, but you were
not conscious of what you were, and for that very reason you were
not in reality True People. Therefore your appearance was not
appropriate to your essence. You were people and you were not
people.

In a roundabout way the philosopher here admits that a definite
consciousness is appropriate to definite people and definite cir-
cumstances. But at the same time he imagines that his moral demand
to people — the demand that they should change their conscious-
ness— will bring about this altered consciousness, and in people who
have changed owing to changed empirical conditions and who, of
course, now also possess a different consciousness, he sees nothing
but a changed [consciousness]. — It is just the same [with the
consciousness for which you are secretly] longing; [in regard to this]
you are [secret, unconscious] egoists — i.e., you are really egoists,
insofar as you are unconscious, but you are non-egoists, insofar as you
are conscious. Or: at the root of your present [consciousness lies] a
definite being, which is not the [being] which I demand; your
consciousness is the consciousness of the egoist such as he should not
[be], and therefore it shows that you yourselves are egoists such as
egoists should not be — or it shows that you should be different from
what you really are. This entire separation of consciousness from the
individuals who are its basis and from their actual conditions, this
notion that the egoist of present-day bourgeois society does not
possess the consciousness corresponding to his egoism, is merely an
old philosophical fad that Jacques le bonhomme here credulously
accepts and copies.* Let us deal with Stirner’s “touching example” of
the avaricious person. He wants to persuade this avaricious person,

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] This fad becomes most
ridiculous in history, where the consciousness of a later epoch regarding an earlier
epoch naturally differs from the consciousness the latter has of itself, e.g., the Greeks
saw themselves through the eyes of the Greeks and not as we see them now; to blame
them for not seeing themselves with our eyes — that is, “not being conscious of
themselves as they really were” — amounts to blaming them for being Greeks.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

251

who is not an “avaricious person” in general, but the avaricious
“Tom or Dick”; a quite individually defined, “unique” avaricious
person, whose avarice is not the category of “avarice” (an abstraction
of Saint Max’s from his all-embracing, complex, “unique” manifesta-
tion of life) and “does not depend on the heading under which other
people” (for example, Saint Max) “classify it” — he wants to persuade
this avaricious person by moral exhortations that he “is satisfying not
himself but one of his desires”. But “you are you only for a
[moment], only as a momentary being are you real. What [is
separated from you,] from the momentary being” is something
absolutely higher, [e.g., money. But whether] “for you” money is
“rather” [a higher pleasure], whether it is for you [something
“absolutely higher” or] not [...]a perhaps [“deny”] myself [? — He]
finds that I am possessed [by avarice] day and night, [but]
this is so only in his reflection. It is he who makes “day and night”
out of the many moments in which I am always the momentary
being, always myself, always real, just as he alone embraces in one
moral judgment the different moments of my manifestation of life
and asserts that they are the satisfaction of avarice. When Saint Max
announces that I am satisfying only one of my desires, and not
myself, he puts me as a complete and whole being in opposition to
me myself. “And in what does this complete and whole being consist?
It is certainly not your momentary being, not what you are at the
present moment” — hence, according to Saint Max himself, it consists
in the holy “being” ( Wigand , p. 171). When “Stirner” says that I
must change my consciousness, then I know for my part that my
momentary consciousness also belongs to my momentary being, and
Saint Max, by disputing that I have this consciousness, attacks as a
covert moralist my whole mode of life.* And then — “do you exist
only when you think about yourself, do you exist only owing to
self-consciousness?” ( Wigand , pp. 157-158.) How can I be anything
but an egoist? How can Stirner, for example, be anything but an
egoist — whether he denies egoism or not? “You are egoists and you
are not egoists, inasmuch as you deny egoism,” — that is what you
preach.

Innocent, “deceived”, “unavowed” school-master! Things are just
the reverse. We egoists in the ordinary sense, we bourgeois, know
quite well: Charite bien ordonnee commence par soi-meme,h and we have

* [Here Marx repeats the remark:] III (Consciousness).

aThe following passage is damaged. — -Ed.
Charity begins at home. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

long had the motto: love thy neighbour as thyself, a interpreted in the
sense that each is his own neighbour. But we deny that we are
heartless egoists, exploiters, ordinary egoists, whose hearts cannot be
lifted up to the exalted feeling of making the interests of their
fellow-men their own — which, between ourselves, only means that
we declare our interests to be the interests of our fellow-men. [You]
deny the “ordinary” [egoism of the] unique egoist [only because] you
[“deny]” your [“natural] relations to the [world]”. Hence you do not
understand why we bring practical egoism to perfection precisely by
denying the phraseology of egoism — we who are concerned with
realising real egoistical interests, not the holy interest of egoism.
Incidentally, it could be foreseen — and here the bourgeois coollv
turns his back on Saint Max — that you German school-masters, if
you once took up the defence of egoism, would proclaim
not real, “mundane and plainly evident” egoism (“the book”,
p. 455), that is to say, “not what is called” egoism, but egoism in
the extraordinary, school-masterlv sense, philosophical or vaga-
bond egoism.

The egoist in the extraordinary sense, therefore, is “only now
discovered”. “Let us examine this new discovery more closelv”

(p. ID-

From what has been just said it is already clear that the egoists who
existed till now have only to change their consciousness in order to
become egoists in the extraordinary sense, hence that the egoist in
agreement with himself is distinguished from the previous type only
by consciousness; i.e., only as a learned man, as a philosopher. It
further follows from the whole historical outlook of Saint Max that,
because the former egoists were ruled only by the “holy”, the true
egoist has to fight only against the “holy”. “Unique” history has
shown us how Saint Max transformed historical conditions into
ideas, and then the egoist into a sinner against these ideas; how every
egoistic manifestation was transformed into a sin [against these]
ideas, [the power of] the privileged into a sin [against the idea] of
equality, into the sin of despotism. [Concerning the] idea of freedom
[of competition,] therefore, it could be [said in “the book”] that
[private property is regarded] by him [(p. 155) as“]the personal” [...]
great, [...] [selfless] egoists [...] essential and invincible [...] only to be
fought by transforming them into something holy and then asserting
that he abolishes the holiness in them, i.e., his holy idea about them,
[i.e.,] abolishes them only insofar as they exist in him as a holy one.b

a Galatians 5: 14. — Ed.

This paragraph is damaged. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

253

Page 50*: “How you are at each moment you are as your creation, and it is precisely
in this creation that you do not want to lose yourself, the creator. You yourself are a
higher being than yourself, i.e., vou are not merely a creation, but likewise a creator;
and it is this that you fail to recognise as an involuntary egoist, and for that reason the
higher being is something foreign to you.”

In a somewhat different variation, this same wisdom is stated on
page 239 of “the book”:

“The species is nothing" (later it becomes all sorts of things, see “Self-Enjoyment”),
“and when the individual rises above the limitations of his individuality, it is precisely
here that he himself appears as an individual; he exists only by raising himself, he
exists only by not remaining what he is. otherwise he would be done for, dead."

In relation to these propositions, to his “creation”, Stirner at once
begins to behave as “creator”, “by no means losing himself in them”:

“You are vou only for a moment, onlv as a momentary being are you real.... At each
moment I am wholly what i am ... what is separated from you. the momentary being”,
is “something absolutely higher” ... ( Wigand , p. 170); and, on page 171 (ibid.), “your
being” is defined as "vour momentary being”.

Whereas in “the book” Saint Max says that besides a momentary
being he has also another, higher being, in the “Apologetical
Commentary” “the momentary being” [of his] individual is equated
with his “complete [and whole] being”, and every [being] as a “mo-
mentary being” is transformed [into an] “absolutely higher being”.
In “the book” therefore he is, at every moment, a higher being than
what he is at that moment, whereas in the Commentary”,
everything that he is not directly at a given moment is defined as an
“absolutelv higher being”, a holv being. — And in contrast to all this
division we read on page 200 of “the book”:

"I know nothing about a division into an ‘imperfect’ and a ‘perfect’ ego.”

“The egoist in agreement with himself” needs no longer sacrifice
himself to something higher, since in his own eyes he is himself this
higher being, and he transfers this schism between a “higher” and a
“lower being” into himself. So, in fact (Saint Sancho contra
Feuerbach, “the book”, p. 243), “the highest being has undergone
nothing but a metamorphosis”. The true egoism of Saint Max
consists in an egoistic attitude to real egoism, to himself, as he is “at
each moment”. This egoistic attitude to egoism is selflessness. From
this aspect Saint Max as a creation is an egoist in the ordinary sense;
as creator he is a selfless egoist. We shall also become acquainted with
the opposite aspect, for both these aspects prove to be genuine
determinations of reflection since they undergo absolute dialectics in
which each of them is the opposite of itself.

* [Marx wrote at the top of this page:] II (Creator and Creation).

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Before entering more deeply into this mystery in its esoteric form,
one has to observe some of [its arduous] life battles.

[On pages 82, 83 Stirner achieves the feat of] bringing the most
general quality, [the egoist,] [into agreement] with himself as creator,
[from the standpoint of the world] of spirit:

[“Christianity aimed] at [delivering us from natural determination (determination
through nature), from desires as a driving force, it consequently wished that man
should not allow himself to be] determined [by his desires. This does not mean that] he
[should have ] no [desires], but that [desires] should not possess [him,] that [they]
should not become fixed, unconquerable, ineradicable. Could we not apply
these machinations of Christianity against desires to its own precept, that we
should be determined by the spirit...? ... Then this would signify the dissolution
of spirit, the dissolution of all thoughts. As one ought to have said there ... so one
would have to say now: We should indeed possess spirit, but spirit should not
possess us.”

“And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the
affections and lusts” (Galatians 5:24) — thus, according to Stirner,
they deal with their crucified affections and lusts like true owners.
He accepts Christianity in instalments, but will not let matters rest at
the crucified flesh alone, wanting to crucify his spirit as well,
consequently, the “whole fellow”.

The only reason why Christianity wanted to free us from the
domination of the flesh and “desires as a driving force” was because
it regarded our flesh, our desires as something foreign to us; it
wanted to free us from determination by nature only because it
regarded our own nature as not belonging to us. For if I myself am
not nature, if my natural desires, my whole natural character, do not
belong to myself — and this is the doctrine of Christianity — then all
determination by nature — whether due to my own natural character
or to what is known as external nature — seems to me a determination
by something foreign, a fetter, compulsion used against me,
heteronomy as opposed to autonomy of the spirit. Stirner accepts this
Christian dialectic without examining it and then applies it to our
spirit. Incidentally, Christianity has indeed never succeeded in
freeing us from the domination of desires, even in that juste milieu
sense foisted on it by Saint Max; it does not go beyond mere moral
injunctions, which remain ineffective in real life. Stirner takes moral
injunctions for real deeds and supplements them with the further
categorical imperative: “We should indeed possess spirit, but spirit
should not possess us” — and consequently all his egoism in
agreement with itself is reduced “on closer examination”, as Hegel
would say, to a moral philosophy that is as delightful as it is edifying
and contemplative.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

255

Whether a desire becomes fixed or not, i.e., whether it obtains
exclusive [power over us] — which, however, does [not] exclude
[further progress] — depends on whether material circumstances,
“bad” mundane conditions permit the normal satisfaction of this
desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of
desires. This latter depends, in turn, on whether we live in
circumstances that allow all-round activity and thereby the full
development of all our potentialities. On the actual conditions, and
the possibility of development they give each individual, depends
also whether thoughts become fixed or not — just as, for example, the
fixed ideas of the German philosophers, these “victims of society”,
qui nous font pitie ,a are inseparable from the German conditions.
Incidentally, in Stirner the domination of desires is a mere phrase,
the imprint of the absolute saint. Thus, still keeping to the “touching
example” of the avaricious person, we read:

“An avaricious person is not an owner, but a servant, and he can do nothing for his
own sake without at the same time doing it for the sake of his master” (p. 400).

No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the
sake of one or other of his needs and for the sake of the organ of this
need — for Stirner this means that this need and its organ are made
into a master over him, just as earlier he made the means for
satisfying a need (cf. the sections on political liberalism and
communism) into a master over him. Stirner cannot eat without at
the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly
conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach
becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire,
and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea — which at the same
time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions in
fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho’s “revolt” against the fixation of
desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral
injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he
merely gives an ideologically high-sounding expression to the most
trivial sentiments of the petty bourgeois.*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Since they attack the
material basis on which the hitherto inevitable fixedness of desires and ideas
depended, the communists are the only people through whose historical activity the
liquefaction of the fixed desires and ideas is in fact brought about and ceases to be an
impotent moral injunction, as it was up to now with all moralists “down to” Stirner.
communist organisation has a twofold effect on the desires produced in the

For whom we feel pity. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Thus, in this first example he fights, on the one hand, against his
carnal desires, and on the other against his spiritual thoughts — on
the one hand against his flesh, on the other against his spirit — when
they, his creations, want to become independent of him, their
creator. How our saint conducts this struggle, how he behaves as
creator towards his creation, we shall now see.

In the Christian “in the ordinary sense”, in the chretien “ simple ”, to
use Fourier’s expression,

“ spirit has undivided power and pays no heed to any persuasion of the ‘flesh’.
However, only through the ‘flesh’ can I break the tyranny of the spirit; for only when
man perceives also his flesh does he perceive himself wholly, and only when he
perceives himself wholly does he become perceptive or rational.... But as soon as the
flesh speaks and — as cannot be otherwise — in a passionate tone ... then he” (the chretien
simple ) “believes he hears devil voices, voices against the spirit ... and with good reason
comes out passionately against them. He would not be a Christian if he were prepared
to tolerate them” (p. 83).

Hence, when his spirit wishes to acquire independence in relation
to him, Saint Max calls his flesh to his aid, and when his flesh

individual by present-day relations; some of these desires — namely desires which exist
under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social
relations — are merely altered by the communist social system, for they are
given the opportunity to develop normally: but others — namelv those originating
solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of [production] and
intercourse — are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which [of the
desires] will be merely changed and [which eliminated] in a communist [society] can
[only be determined in a practical] way, by [changing the real], actual [“desires”, and
not by making comparisons with earlier historical conditions].

The two expressions: [“fixed” and “desires”], which we [have just used in order to
be able] to disprove [this “unique” fact of] Stirner’s, [are of course] quite
inappropriate. The fact that one desire of an individual in modern society can be
satisfied at the expense of all others, and that this “ought not to be” and that this is
more or less the case with all individuals in the world today and that thereby the free
development of the individual as a whole is made impossible — this fact is expressed by
Stirner thus: “the desires become fixed” in the egoist in disagreement with himself,
for Stirner knows nothing of the empirical connection of this fact with the world as it is
today. A desire is already by its mere existence something “fixed”, and it can occur
only to Saint Max and his like not to allow his sex instinct, for instance, to become
“fixed”; it is that already and will cease to be fixed only as the result of castration or
impotence. Each need, which forms the basis of a “desire”, is likewise something
“fixed”, and try as he may Saint Max cannot abolish this “fixedness” and for example
contrive to free himself from the necessity of eating within “fixed” periods of
time. The communists have no intention of abolishing the fixedness of their desires
and needs, an intention which Stirner, immersed in his world of fancy, ascribes to
them and to all other men; they only strive to achieve an organisation of production
and intercourse which will make possible the normal satisfaction of all needs, i.e., a
satisfaction which is limited only by the needs themselves.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

257

becomes rebellious, he remembers that he is also spirit. What the
Christian does in one direction, Saint Max does in both. He is the
chretien “compose”, he once again reveals himself as the perfect
Christian.

Here, in this example, Saint Max, as spirit, does not appear as the
creator of his flesh and vice versa; he finds his flesh and his spirit
both present, and only when one side rebels does he remember that
he has also the other, and asserts this other side, as his true ego,
against it. Here, therefore, Saint Max is creator only insofar as he is
one who is “ also-otherwise-determined ”, insofar as he possesses yet
another quality besides that which it just suits him to subsume under
the category of “creation”. His entire creative activity consists here in
the good resolution to perceive himself, and indeed to perceive
himself entirely or be rational ,* to perceive himself as a “complete,
entire being”, as a being different from “his momentary being”, and
even in direct contradiction to the kind of being he is “momen-
tarily”.

[Let us now turn to one of the “arduous] life battles” [of our saint]:

[Pages 80, 81 : “Mv zeal] need not [be less than the] most fanatical, [but at the same]
time [I remain] towards [it cold as ice, sceptical], and its [most irreconcilable enemy;] I
remain [its judge, for I am its] owner.”

[If one desires to] give [meaning] to what Saint [Sancho] says about
himself, then it amounts ro this: his creative activity here is limited to
the fact that in his zeal he preserves the consciousness of his zeal, that
he reflects on it, that he adopts the attitude of the reflecting ego to
himself as the real ego. It is to consciousness that he arbitrarily gives
the name “creator”. He is “creator” only insofar as he possesses
consciousness.

“Thereupon, you forget yourself in sweet self-oblivion.... But do you exist only
when you think of yourself, and do you vanish when you forget yourself? Who does not
forget himself at every instant, who does not lose sight of himself a thousand times an
hour?” ( Wigand , pp. 157, 158).

This, of course, Sancho cannot forgive his “self-oblivion” and
therefore “remains at the same time its most irreconcilable
enemy”.

Saint Max, the creation, burns with immense zeal at the very time
when Saint Max, the creator, has already risen above his zeal by
means of reflection; or the real Saint Max burns with zeal, and the
reflecting Saint Max imagines that he has risen above this zeal. This

* Here, therefore. Saint Max completely justifies Feuerbach’s “touching example”
of the hetaera and the beloved. In the first case, a man “perceives” only his flesh or only
her flesh, in the second he perceives himself entirely or her entirely. See Wigand, pp. 170,
171.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

rising in reflection above what he actually is, is now amusingly and
adventurously described in the phrases of a novel to the effect that
he allows his zeal to remain in existence, i.e., he does not draw any
serious consequences from his hostility to it, but his attitude towards
it is “cold as ice”, “sceptical” and that of its “most irreconcilable
enemy”.

Insofar as Saint Max burns with zeal, i.e., insofar as zeal is his true
quality, his attitude to it is not that of creator; and insofar as his
attitude is that of creator, he does not really burn with zeal, zeal is
foreign to him, not a quality of him. So long as he burns with zeal he
is not the owner of zeal, and as soon as he becomes the owner, he
ceases to burn with zeal. As an aggregate complex, he is at every
instant, in the capacity of creator and owner, the sum total of all his
qualities, with the exception of the one quality which he puts in
opposition to himself, the embodiment of all the others, as creation
and property — so that precisely that quality which he stresses as his
own is always foreign to him.

No matter how extravagant Saint Max’s true story of his heroic
exploits within himself, in his own consciousness, may sound, it is
nevertheless an acknowledged fact that there do exist reflect-
ing individuals, who imagine that in and through reflection they
have risen above everything,* because in actual fact they never go
beyond reflection.

This trick — of declaring oneself against some definite quality as
being someone who is also-otherwise-determined, namely, in the
present example as being the possessor of reflection directed towards the
opposite — this trick can be applied with the necessary variations to any
quality you choose. For example, my indifference need be no less
than that of the most blase person; but at the same time I remain
towards it extremely ardent, sceptical and its most irreconcilable
enemy, etc.

[It should] not be forgotten that [the aggregate] complex of all his
[qualities, the owner] — in which capacity [Saint] Sancho [by reflect-
ing opposes one particular] quality — is in this [case nothing but

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] All this is in fact merely
a highflown description of the bourgeois, who controls each of his emotions so that he
should not sustain any loss, and on the other hand boasts about numerous qualities,
e.g., philanthropic zeal, towards which he must remain “cold as ice, sceptical and an
irreconcilable enemy”, in order not to lose himself as owner in his philanthropic zeal
but to remain the owner of philanthropy. Whereas the bourgeois sacrifices his
inclinations and desires always for a definite real interest, Saint Max sacrifices the
quality towards which he adopts the attitude of the “most irreconcilable enemy” for
the sake of his reflecting ego, his reflection.

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259

Sancho’s] simple [reflection about this] one quality, [which he has]
transformed [into his ego by] putting forward, instead of the whole
[complex, one] merely reflecting [quality and] putting forward
in opposition to each of his qualities [and to] the series [merely
the one] quality of reflection, an ego, and himself as the imag-
ined ego.

Now he himself gives expression to this hostile attitude to himself,
this solemn parody of Bentham’s book-keeping81 of his own interests
and qualities.

Page 188: “An interest, no matter towards what end it may be directed, acquires a
slave in the shape of myself, if I am unable to rid myself of it; it is no longer my
property, but I am its property. Let us, therefore, accept the directive of criticism that
we should feel happy only in dissolution.”

“We!” — Who are “We?” It never occurs to “us” to “accept”
the “directive of criticism”. — Thus Saint Max, who for the mo-
ment is under the police surveillance of “criticism”, here demands
“the same well-being for all”, “equal well-being for all in one
and the same [respect]”, “the direct tyrannical domination of
religion ”.

His interestedness in the extraordinary sense is here revealed as a
heavenly disinterestedness.

Incidentally, there is no need here to deal at length with the fact
that in existing society it does not at all depend on Saint Sancho
whether an “interest” “acquires a slave in the shape of himself” and
whether “he is unable to rid himself of it”. The fixation of interests
through division of labour and class relations is far more obvious
than the fixation of “desires” and “thoughts”.

In order to outbid critical criticism, our saint should at least have
gone as far as the dissolution of dissolution, for otherwise dissolution
becomes an interest which he cannot get rid of, which in him
acquires a slave. Dissolution is no longer his property, but he is the
property of dissolution. Had he wanted to be consistent in the
example just given, [he should] [have treated his zeal against his]
own “zeal” as [an “interest”] and [behaved] towards it [as an “irre-
concilable] enemy”. [But he should have] also considered his [“ice-
cold” disinterestedness] in relation to his [“ice-cold” zeal] and beco-
me [just as wholly “ice-cold”] — and thereby, [obviously, he would
have spared] his original [“interest”] and hence himself the “tempta-
tion” to turn [in a circle] on the [heel] of speculation. — Instead, he
cheerfully continues (ibid.):

“I shall only take care to safeguard my own property for myself” (i.e., to safeguard
myself from my property) “and, in order to safeguard it, I take it back into myself at

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

any time, I destroy in it any inclination towards independence and absorb it before it
becomes fixed and can become a fixed idea or passion.”

How does Stirner “absorb” the persons who are his property!

Stirner has just allowed himself to be given a “vocation” by
“criticism”. He asserts that he at once absorbs this “vocation” again,
by saying on page 189:

“I do this, however, not for the sake of my human vocation, but because 1 call on
myself to do so.”

If I do not call on myself to do so, I am, as we have just heard, a
slave, not an owner, not a true egoist, I do not behave to myself as
creator, as I should do as a true egoist; therefore, insofar as a person
wants to be a true egoist, he must call himself to this vocation given
him by “criticism”. Thus, it is a universal vocation, a vocation for all,
not merely his vocation, but also his vocation.

On the other hand, the true egoist appears here as an ideal which
is unattainable by the majority of individuals, for (p. 434) “innately
limited intellects unquestionably form the most numerous class of
mankind” — and how could these “limited intellects” be able to
penetrate the mystery of unlimited absorption of oneself and the
world.

Incidentally, all these terrible expressions — to destroy, to absorb
etc. — are merely a new variation of the above-mentioned “ice-cold,
most irreconcilable enemy”.

Now, at last, we are put in a position to obtain an insight into
Stirner’s objections to communism. They were nothing but a
preliminary, concealed legitimisation of his egoism in agreement
with itself, in which these objections are resurrected in the flesh. The
“ equal well-being of all in one and the same respect ” is resurrected in the
demand that “we should [only] feel happv in [dissolution”. “Care ]” is
resurrected [in the form of the unique “care]” to secure [one's ego]
[as one’s property]; [but “with the passage of time]” [“care”] again
arises as to “how” [one can arrive] at a [unity — ] viz., unity [of creator
and creation.] And, finally, humanism re[-appears, which in the
form of the true] egoist confronts empirical individuals as an
unattainable ideal. Hence page 117 of “the book” should read as
follows: Egoism in agreement with itself really endeavours to
transform every man into a “secret police state”. The spy and sleuth
“reflection” keeps a strict eye on every impulse of spirit and body,
and every deed and thought, every manifestation of life is, for him, a
matter of reflection, i.e., a police matter. It is this dismemberment of
man into “natural instinct” and “reflection” (the inner plebeian —

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

261

creation, and the internal police — creator) which constitutes the
egoist in agreement with himself.*

Hess ( Die letzten Philosophen, p. 26) reproached our saint:

“He is constantly under the secret police surveillance of his critical conscience ....
He has not forgotten the ‘directive of criticism ... to feel happy only in dissolution’....
The egoist — his critical conscience is always reminding him — should never become so
interested in anything as to devote himself entirely to his subject”, and so on.

Saint Max “empowers himself” to answer as follows:

When “Hess says of Stirner that he is constantly, etc’ — what does this mean except
that when he criticises he wants to criticise not at random” (i.e., by the way: in the
unique fashion), “not talking twaddle, but criticising properly” (i.e., like a human
being)?

“What it means”, when Hess speaks of the secret police, etc., is so
clear from the passage by Hess quoted above that even Saint Max’s
“unique” understanding of it can only be explained as a deliberate
misunderstanding. His “virtuositv of thought” is transformed here
into a virtuosity in lying, for which we do not reproach him since it
was his only way out, but which is hardly in keeping with the subtle
little distinctions on the right to lie which he sets out elsewhere in
“the book”. Incidentally, we have already demonstrated — at greater
length than he deserves — that “when he criticises”, Sancho by no
means “criticises properly”, but “criticises at random” and “talks
twaddle”.

Thus, the attitude of the true egoist as creator towards himself as
creation was first of all defined in the sense that in opposition to a
definition in which he became fixed as a creation — for example, as
against himself as thinker, as spirit — he asserts himself as a person
also-otherwise-determined, as flesh. Later, he no longer asserts
himself as really also-otherwise-determined, but as the mere idea of
being also-otherwise-determined in general — hence, in the above
example as someone who also-does-not think, who is thoughtless or
indifferent to thought, an idea which he abandons again as soon as
its nonsensicalness becomes evident. See above on turning round on
the heel of speculation.3 Hence the creative activity consisted here in
the reflection that this single determination, in the present case
thought, could also be indifferent for him, i.e., it consisted in
reflecting in general; as a result, of course, he creates only reflective

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Incidentally, if Saint
Max makes “a Prussian officer of high rank” say: “Every Prussian carries his
gendarme in his heart”, it ought to read: the king’s gendarme, for only the “egoist in
agreement with himself” carries hh own gendarme in his heart.

See this volume, p. 259 . — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

definitions, if he creates anything at all (e.g., the idea of antithesis,
the simple essence of which is concealed by all kinds of fiery
arabesques).

As for the content of himself as a creation, we have seen that
nowhere does he create this content, these definite qualities, e.g., his
thought, his zeal, etc., but only the reflective definition of this
content as creation, the idea that these definite qualities are his
creations. All his qualities are present in him and whence they come
is all the same to him. He, therefore, needs neither to develop
them — for example, to learn to dance, in order to have mastery over
his feet, or to exercise his thought on material which is not given to
everyone, and is not procurable by everyone, in order to become the
owner of his thought — nor does he need to worry about the
conditions in the world, which in reality determine the extent to
which an individual can develop.

Stirner actually only rids himself of one quality by means of
another (i.e., the suppression of his remaining qualities by this
“other”). In reality, however, [as we] have [already shown,] he does
this only insofar as this quality has not only achieved free
development, i.e., has not remained merely potential, but also
insofar as conditions in the world have permitted him to develop in
an equal measure a totality of qualities, [that is to say,] thanks to the
division of [labour,]3 thus making possible the [predominant pursuit]
of a [single passion, e.]g., that of [writing] books. [In general], it is an
[absurdity to assume], as Saint [Max does], that one could satisfy one
[passion], apart from all others, that one could satisfy it without at
the same time satisfying oneself, the entire living individual. If this
passion assumes an abstract, isolated character, if it confronts me as
an alien power, if, therefore, the satisfaction of the individual
appears as the one-sided satisfaction of a single passion — this by no
means depends on consciousness or “good will” and least of all on
lack of reflection on the concept of this quality, as Saint Max
imagines.

It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but
on life; it depends on the individual’s empirical development and
manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions
obtaining in the world. If the circumstances in which the individual
lives allow him only the [one]-sided development of one quality at the
expense of all the rest, [if] they give him the material and time to
develop only that one quality, then this individual achieves only a
one-sided, crippled development. No moral preaching avails here.

See this volume, pp. 254-5 5~Ed.

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263

And the manner in which this one, pre-eminently favoured quality
develops depends again, on the one hand, on the material available
for its development and, on the other hand, on the degree and
manner in which the other qualities are suppressed. Precisely
because thought, for example, is the thought of a particular, definite
individual, it remains his definite thought, determined by his
individuality and the conditions in which he lives. The thinking
individual therefore has no need to resort to prolonged reflection
about thought as such in order to declare that his thought is his own
thought, his property; from the outset it is his own, peculiarly
determined thought and it was precisely his peculiarity which [in
the case of Saint] Sancho [was found to be] the “opposite” of
this, a peculiarity which is peculiarity “as such”. In the case of an
individual, for example, whose life embraces a wide circle of varied
activities and practical relations to the world, and who, there-
fore, lives a many-sided life, thought has the same character
of universality as every other manifestation of his life. Conse-
quently, it neither becomes fixed in the form of abstract thought
nor does it need complicated tricks of reflection when the
individual passes from thought to some other manifestation of
life. From the outset it is always a factor in the total life of
the individual, one which disappears and is reproduced as
required.

In the case of a parochial Berlin school-master or author, however,
whose activity is restricted to arduous work on the one hand and the
pleasure of thought on the other, whose world extends from Moabit
to Kopenick and ends behind the Hamburger Tor,82 whose relations
to this world are reduced to a minimum by his pitiful position in life,
when such an individual experiences the need to think, it is indeed
inevitable that his thought becomes just as abstract as he himself and
his life, and that thought confronts him, who is quite incapable of
resistance, in the form of a fixed power, whose activity offers the
individual the possibility of a momentary escape from his “bad
world”, of a momentary pleasure. In the case of such an individual
the few remaining desires, which arise not so much from intercourse
with the world as from the constitution of the human body, express
themselves only through repercussion , i.e., they assume in their
narrow development the same one-sided and crude character as does
his thought, they appear only at long intervals, stimulated by the
excessive development of the predominant desire (fortified by
immediate physical causes, e.g. [stomach] spasm) and are manifested
turbulently and forcibly, with the most brutal suppression of the

264

Karl Marx and Frederick Engel:

ordinary, [natural] desire [ — this leads to further] domination over
[thought.] As a matter of course, the school-master’s [thinking
reflects on and speculates about] this empirical [fact in a school-
masterly fashion. [But the mere announcement] that Stirner in
general “creates” [his qualities] .does not [explain] even their
particular form of development. The extent to which these qualities
develop on the universal or local scale, the extent to which they
transcend local narrow-mindedness or remain within its confines,
depends not on Stirner, but on the development of world
intercourse and on the part which he and the locality where he lives
play in it. That under favourable circumstances some individuals
are able to rid themselves of their local narrow-mindedness is
by no means due to individuals imagining that they have got
rid of, or intend to get rid of their local narrow-mindedness, but is
only due to the fact that in their real empirical life individuals,
actuated by empirical needs, have been able to bring about world
intercourse.*

The only thing our saint achieves with the aid of his arduous
reflection about his qualities and passions is that by his constant
crotchetiness and scuffling with them he poisons the enjoyment and
satisfaction of them.

Saint Max creates, as already said, only himself as a creation, i.e.,
he is satisfied with placing himself in this category of created entity.
His activity [as] creator consists in regarding himself as a creation,
and he does not even go on to resolve this division of himself into
[creator and] creation, which is his own [product]. The division [into
the “essential” and] the “inessential” becomes [for him a] permanent
life process, [hence mere appearance,] i.e., his real life exists only [in
“pure”] reflection, is [not] even actual existence; [for since this latter
is at every] instant outside [him and his reflection], he tries [in vain
to] present [reflection as] essential.

“But [since] this enemy” (viz., the true egoist as a creation) “begets himself in his
defeat, since consciousness, by becoming fixed on him, does not free itself from him,
but instead always dwells on him and always sees itself besmirched, and since this

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] This specifically
revolutionary attitude of the communists to the hitherto existing conditions of the life
of the individuals has already been described above [see this volume, pp. 246, 255], In
a later profane passage Saint Max admits that the ego receives an “impulse” (in Fich-
te’s sense) from the world. That the communists intend to gain control over this
“impulse” — which indeed becomes an extremely complex and multifariously deter-
mined “impulse” if one is not content with the mere phrase — is, of course, for
Saint Max much too daring an idea to discuss.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

265

content of his endeavour is at the same time the very lowest, we find only an individual
restricted to himself and his petty activity” (inactivity), “and brooding over himself, as
unhappy as he is wretched" (Hegel)*.

What we have said so far about the division of Sancho into creator
and creation, he himself now finally expresses in a logical form: the
creator and the creation are transformed into the presupposing and
the presupposed ego, or (inasmuch as his presupposition [of his ego]
is a positing) into the positing and the posited ego:

“I for my part start from a certain presupposition since I presuppose myself; but my
presupposition does not strive for its perfection” (rather does Saint Max strive for its
abasement), “on the contrary, it serves me merely as something to enjoy and
consume” tan enviable enjoyment!). “I am nourished by my presupposition alone and
exist only bv consuming it. But for that reason” (a grand “for that reason”!) “the
presupposition in question is no presupposition at all, for since" (a grand “for since”!)
“I am the unique” (it should read: the true egoist in agreement with himself), “I know
nothing about the duality of a presupposing and presupposed ego (of an ‘imperfect’
and perfect’ ego or man)” — it should read: the perfection of my ego consists in this
alone, that at every instant I know myself as an imperfect ego, as a creation — "but" (a
magnificent “but”!) “the fact that I consume myself signifies merely that I am.” (It
should read: The fact that I am signifies here merely that in me I consume in
imagination the category of the presupposed.) “I do not presuppose myself, because I
really only posit or create myself perpetually” (viz., I posit and create myself as the
presupposed, posited or created) “and I am I only because 1 am not presupposed, but
posited” (it should read: and I exist onlv because I am antecedent to my positing)
“and, again, I am posited only at the moment when I posit myself, i.e., I am creator
and creation in one.”

Stirner is a “posited man”; since he is always a posited ego, and his
ego is “ also a man' ( Wigand , p. 183). “For that reason" he is a posited
man; “ for since” he is never driven by his passions to excesses,
“therefore" , he is what burghers call a sedate man, “but" the fact that
he is a sedate man “signifies merely” that he always keeps an account
of his own transformations and refractions.

What was so far only “for us” — to use for once, as Stirner does, the
ianguage of Hegei — viz., that his whole creative activity had no other
content than general definitions of reflection, is now “posited” by
Stirner himself. Saint Max’s struggle against “ essence ” here attains its
“final goal” in that he identifies himself with essence, and indeed
with pure, speculative essence. The relation of creator and creation is
transformed into an explication of self -presupposition, i.e., [Stirner
transforms] into an extremely “clumsy” and confused [idea] what
Hegel [says] about reflection in “the [Doctrine of Essence]”. [Since]

a G.W.F. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes. B. Selbstbewusstsein. 3. Das ungliick-
liche Bewusstsein. — Ed.

b In the German original this is a pun: gesetzter Mann can mean “sedate man” or
“posited man”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Saint Max takes out one [element of his] reflection, [viz., positing
reflection, his fantasies become] “negative”, [because he] transforms
himself, etc., into “self-[presupposition”, in] contradistinction to
[himself as the positing] and himself as the posited, [and] transforms
reflection into the mystical antithesis of creator and creation. It
should be pointed out, by the way, that in this section of his Logik
Hegel analyses the “machinations” of the “creative nothing”, which
explains also why Saint Max already on page 8 had to “posit” himself
as this “creative nothing”.

We shall now “episodically insert” a few passages from Hegel’s
explanation of self-presupposition for comparison with Saint Max’s
explanation. But as Hegel does not write so incoherently and “at
random” as our Jacques le bonhomme, we shall have to collect these
passages from various pages of the Logik in order to bring them into
correspondence with Sancho’s great thesis.

“Essence presupposes itself and is itself the transcendence of this presupposition.
Since it is the repulsion of itself from itself or indifference towards itself, negative
relation to itself, it thereby posits itself against itself ... positing has no presupposition
... the other is only posited through essence itself... Thus, reflection is only the
negative of itself. Reflection in so far as it presupposes is simply positing reflection. It
consists therefore in this, that it is itself and' not itself in a unity" (“creator and
creation in one”) (Hegel, Logik, II, pp. 5, 16, 17, 18, 22).

One might have expected from Stirner’s “virtuosity of thought”
that he would have gone on to further researches into Hegel’s Logik.
However, he wisely refrained from doing so. For, if he had done so,
he would have found that he, as mere “posited” ego, as creation, i.e.,
insofar as he possesses existence, is merely a seeming ego, and he is
“ essence ”, creator, only insofar as he does not exist, but only imagines
himself. We have already seen, and shall see again further on, that
all his qualities, his whole activity, and his whole attitude to the
world, are a mere appearance which he creates for himself,
nothing but “juggling tricks on the tightrope of the objective”. His
ego is always a dumb, hidden “ego”, hidden in his ego imagined as
essence.

Since the true egoist in his creative activity is, therefore, only a
paraphrase of speculative reflection or pure essence, it follows,
“according to the myth”, “by natural reproduction”, as was already
revealed when examining the “arduous life battles” of the true
egoist, that his “creations” are limited to the simplest determinations
of reflection, such as identity, difference, equality, inequality,
[opposition,] etc. — determinations [of reflection] which he [tries] to
make clear for himself in [“himself”], concerning whom “the tidings
have [gone] as far as [Berlin]”. [Concerning] his presuppositionless

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Max Stirner

Drawing by Engels

(The inscription in German reads: “Max Stirner.

Drawn from memory by Frederick Engels. London, 1892 ”.)

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

269

[ego] we [shall] have occasion to “hear [a little] word” later on. See,
inter alia, “The Unique”.3

As in Sancho’s construction of history the later historical phenome-
non is transformed, by Hegel’s method, into the cause, the creator,
of an earlier phenomenon, so in the case of the egoist in agreement
with himself the Stirner of today is transformed into the creator of
the Stirner of yesterday, although, to use his language, the Stirner of
today is the creation of the Stirner of yesterday. Reflection, indeed,
reverses all this, and in reflection the Stirner of yesterday is the
creation of the Stirner of today, as a product of reflection, as an
idea — just as in reflection the conditions of the external world are
creations of his reflection.

Page 216: “Do not seek in ‘self-denial’ the freedom that actually deprives you of
yourselves, but seek yourselves’’ (i.e., seek yourselves in self-denial), “ become egoists ,
each of you should become an all-powerful ego!”

After the foregoing, we should not be surprised if later on Saint
Max’s attitude to this proposition is again that of creator and most
irreconcilable enemy and he “dissolves” his lofty moral postulate:
“Become an all-powerful ego” into this, that each, in any case, does
what he can, and that he can do what he does, and therefore, of
course, for Saint Max, he is “all-powerful”.

Incidentally, the nonsense of the egoist in agreement with himself
is summarised in the proposition quoted above. First comes the
moral injunction to seek and, moreover, to seek oneself. This is
defined in the sense that man should become something that he so
far is not, namely, an egoist, and this egoist is defined as being an
“all-powerful ego”, in whom the peculiar ability has become resolved
from actual ability into the ego, into omnipotence, into the fantastic
idea of ability. To seek oneself means, therefore, to become
something different from what one is and, indeed, to become
all-powerful, i.e., nothing, a non-thing, a phantasmagoria.

We have now progressed so far that one of the profoundest
mysteries of the unique, and at the same time a problem that has
long kept the civilised world in a state of anxious suspense, can be
disclosed and solved.

Who is Szeliga? Since the appearance of the critical Literatur-
Zeitung (see Die heilige Familie, etc.) this question has been put by

3 See this volume, p. 433. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

everyone who has followed the development of German philosophy.
Who is Szeliga? Everyone asks, everyone listens attentively when he
hears the barbaric sound of this name — but no one replies.

Who is Szeliga? Saint Max gives us the key to this “secret of
secrets” .

Szeliga is Stirner as a creation, Stirner is Szeliga as creator. Stirner is
the “I”, Szeliga the “you”, in “the book”. Hence Stirner, the creator,
behaves towards Szeliga, his creation, as towards his “most
irreconcilable enemy”. As soon as Szeliga wishes to acquire inde-
pendence in relation to Stirner — he made a hapless attempt in
this direction in the Norddeutsche Blatter a — Saint Max “takes him back
into himself”, an experiment which was carried out against this
attempt of Szeliga’s on pages 176-79 of the “Apologetic Commen-
tary” in Wigand. The struggle of the creator against the creation, of
Stirner against Szeliga, is, however, only a seeming one: [Now]
Szeliga advances against his creator the phrases of this [creator
himself] — for example, the assertion “that [the mere,] bare body is
[absence of] thought” ( Wigand , p. 148). Saint [Max,] as we have seen,
[was thinking] only of [the bare flesh], the body before its
[formation], and in [this connection] he gave the body the
[determination] of being “the other of thought”, non-thought and
the non-thinking being, hence absence of thought; and indeed in a
later passage he bluntly declares that only absence of thought (as
previously only the flesh — thus the two concepts are treated as
identical) saves him from thoughts (p. 196).

We find a still more striking proof of this mysterious connection in
Wigand. We have already seen on page 7 of “the book” that the
“ego”, i.e., Stirner, is “the unique”. On page 153 of the
“Commentary” he addresses his “you”: “You” ... “are the content of
the phrase” , viz., the content of the “unique”, and on the same page it
is stated: “he overlooks the fact that he himself, Szeliga, is the content of
the phrase” . “The unique” is a phrase, as Saint Max says in so many
words. Considered as the “ ego ”, i.e., as creator, he is the owner of the
phrase — this is Saint Max. Considered as “you” , i.e., as creation, he is
the content of the phrase — this is Szeliga, as we have just been told.
Szeliga the creation appears as a selfless egoist, as a degenerate Don
Quixote; Stirner the creator appears as an egoist in the ordinary
sense, as Saint Sancho Panza.

Here, therefore, the other aspect of the antithesis of creator and
creation makes its appearance, each of the two aspects containing its
opposite in itself. Here Sancho Panza Stirner, the egoist in the

Szeliga, “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Von Max Stirner”. — Ed.

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271

ordinary sense, is victorious over Don Quixote Szeliga, the selfless
and illusory egoist, is victorious over him precisely as Don Quixote by
his faith in the world domination of the holy. Who indeed was
Stirner’s egoist in the [ordinary] sense if not Sancho [Panza,] and
who his self-sacrificing egoist [if not] Don Quixote, and what was
[their mutual] relation in the [form in which it has so far existed if]
not the relation of [Sancho Panza Stirner] to Don Quixote [Szeliga?
Now as] Sancho Panza [Stirner belongs to himself as] Sancho only [in
order to make Szeliga as] Don Quixote [believe that] he surpasses
him in Don [quixotry,] and [in accordance with this role, as] the
presupposed universal Don [quixotry,] he takes [no steps] against the
[Don quixotry of his] former master (Don quixotry, by which he
swears with all the firm faith of a servant), and at the same time he
displays the cunning already described by Cervantes. In actual
content he 4 is, therefore, the defender of the practical petty
bourgeois, but he combats the consciousness that corresponds to the
petty bourgeois, a consciousness which in the final analysis reduces
itself to the idealising ideas of the petty bourgeois about the
bourgeoisie to whom he cannot attain.

Thus, Don Quixote now, as Szeliga, performs mental services for
his former armour-bearer.

How greatly Sancho in his new “transformation” has retained his
old habits, he shows on every page. “Swallowing” and “consuming”
still constitute one of his chief qualities, his “natural timidity” has still
such mastery over him that the King of Prussia and Prince Heinrich
LXXII become transformed for him into the “Emperor of China” or

the “Sultan” and he ventures to speak only about the “G a

chambers”; he still strews around him proverbs and moral sayings
from his knapsack, he continues to be afraid of “spectres” and even
asserts that they alone are to be feared; the only difference is that
whereas Sancho in his unholiness was bamboozled by the peasants in
the tavern, now in a state of saintliness he continually bamboozles
himself.

But let us return to Szeliga. Who has not long ago discovered the
hand of Szeliga in all the “phrases” which Saint Sancho put into the
mouth of his “you”? And it is always possible to discover traces of
Szeliga not only in the phrases of this “you”, but also in the phrases
in which Szeliga appears as creator, i.e., as Stirner. But because
Szeliga is a creation, he could only figure in Die heilige Familie as a
“mystery” . The revelation of this mystery was the task of Stirner the
creator. We surmised, of course, that some great, holy adventure was

German. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

at the root of this. Nor were we deceived. The unique adventure
really has never been seen or heard of and surpasses the adventure
with the fulling mills in Cervantes’ twentieth chapter.

3. The Revelation of John the Divine,
or (‘The Logic of the New Wisdom ”

In the beginning was the word, the logos. In it was life, and the life
was the light of men. And the light shone in darkness and the
darkness did not comprehend it. That was the true light, it was in the
world, and the w'orld did not know it. He came into his own, and his
own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he
power to become owners, who believe in the name of the unique.
[But who] has ever [seen] the unique [?]a

[Let] us now [examine] this “light of the [world’’ in “the] logic of
the new wisdom [”, for Saint] Sancho does not rest content with his
previous [destructions].

[In the case of our] “unique” author, it is a matter [of course that]
the basis of his [genius lies] in the brilliant [series of personal]
advantages [which constitute] his special [virtuosity] of thought.
[Since] all these advantages have already been extensively demon-
strated, it suffices here to give a brief summary of the most
important of them: carelessness of thought — confusion — incoher-
ence— admitted clumsiness — endless repetitions — constant con-
tradiction with himself — unequalled comparisons — attempts to in-
timidate the reader — systematic legacy-hunting in the realm of
thoughts by means of the levers “you”, “it”, “one”, etc., and crude
abuse of the conjunctions for, therefore, for that reason, because,
accordingly, but, etc. — ignorance — clumsv assertions — solemn frivol-
ity— revolutionary phrases and peaceful thoughts — biuster — bom-
bastic vulgarity and coquetting with cheap indecency — elevation of
Nante the loafer83 to the rank of an absolute concept — dependence
on Hegelian traditions and current Berlin phrases — in short, sheer
manufacture of a thin beggar’s broth (491 pages of it) in the
Rumford manner.

Drifting like bones in this beggar’s broth are a whole series of
transitions, a few specimens of which we shall now' give for the
amusement of the German public depressed as it is:

“Could we not — now, however — one sometimes shares — one can then — to the
efficacy of ... belongs especially that which one frequently ... hears called — and that is
to say — to conclude, it can now be clear — in the meantime — thus it can, incidentally, be

a John 1:1, 4-5, 9-12, 18 (paraphrased). — Ed.

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273

thought here — were it not for — or if, perhaps, it were not — progress from ... to the
point that ... is not difficult — from a certain point of view it is argued approximately
thus — for example, and so on ”, etc., and “it is to that” in all possible “transformations”.

We can at once mention here a [logical] trick about which [it is
impossible] to decide whether it owes [its] existence to the [lauded]
efficiency of Sancho [or to] the inefficiency of his [thinking]. This
[trick consists] in seizing on [one aspect], treating it as if it were the
sole [and only] aspect so far known of an idea [or] concept which [has
several well]-defined aspects, foisting this aspect [on the concept as]
its sole characteristic and then setting [against it every other] aspect
under a [new name, as] something original. This is how the concepts
of freedom and peculiarity are dealt with, [as] we shall see later.3

Among the categories which owe their origin not so much to the
personality of Sancho, as to the universal distress in which the
German theoreticians find themselves at the present time, the first
place is taken by trashy distinction, the extreme of trashiness. Since
our saint immerses himself in such “soul-torturing” antitheses as
singular and universal, private interest and universal interest,
ordinary egoism and selflessness, etc., in the final analysis one arrives
at the trashiest mutual concessions and dealings between the two
aspects, which again rest on the most subtle distinctions — distinctions
whose existence side by side is expressed by “ also ” and whose
separation from each other is then maintained by means of a
miserable “ insofar as”. Such trashy distinctions, for instance, are:
how people exploit one another, but none does so at the expense of
another, the extent to which something in me is inherent or suggested;
the construction of human and of unique work, existing side by side,
what is indispensable for human life and what is indispensable for
unique life; what belongs to personality in its pure form and what is
essentially fortuitous, to decide which Saint Max, from his point of
view, has no criterion at all; what belongs to the rags and tatters and
what to the skin of the individual; what by means of denial he gets rid
of altogether or appropriates, to what extent he sacrifices merely his
freedom or merely his peculiarity, in which case he also makes a
sacrifice but only insofar as, properly speaking, he does not make a
sacrifice; what brings me into relation with others as a link or as a
personal relation. Some of these distinctions are absolutely trashy,
others — in the case of Sancho at least — lose all meaning and
foundation. One can regard as the peak of these trashy distinctions
that between the creation of the worldby the individual and the impulse
which the individual receives from the world. If, for example, he had

3 See this volume, pp. 305-09. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

gone more deeply here into this impulse, into the whole extent and
multifarious character of its influence on him, he would in the end
have discovered the contradiction that he is as blindly [dependent] on
the world as he [egoistically] and ideologically creates [it]. (See: “My
Self-Enjoyment”a.) He [would not then have put] side by side [his“]
also” and “insofar as ”, [any more than] “human” work [and]
“unique” work; he would not have opposed one to the other,
therefore one would [not have] attacked the other [in the rear,] and
the “egoist in agreement [with himself”] would not be completely
[subordinated to himself] — but we [know] that the latter did not need
to be [presupposed] because from the outset this was the point of
departure.

This trashy play with distinctions occurs throughout “the book”; it
is a main lever also for the other logical tricks and particularly takes
the form of a moral casuistry that is as self-satisfied as it is
ridiculously cheap. Thus, it is made clear to us by means of examples
how far the true egoist has the right to tell lies and how far he has
not; to what extent the betrayal of confidence is “despicable” and to
what extent it is not; to what extent the Emperor Sigismund and the
French King Francis I had the right to break their oath84 and how far
their behaviour in this respect was “disgraceful”, and other subtle
historical illustrations of the same sort. Against these painstaking
distinctions and petty questions there stands out in strong relief the
indifference of our Sancho for whom it is all the same and who
ignores all actual, practical and conceptual differences. In general we
can already say now that his ability to distinguish is far inferior to his
ability not to distinguish, to regard all cats as black in the darkness of
the holy, and to reduce everything to anything — an art which finds
its adequate expression in the use of the apposition.

Embrace your “ass”, Sancho, you have found him again here. He
gallops merrily to meet you, taking no notice of the kicks he has been
given, and greets you with his ringing voice. Kneel before him,
embrace his neck and fulfil the calling laid down for you by
Cervantes in Chapter XXX.

The apposition is Saint Sancho’s ass, his logical and historical
locomotive, the driving force of “the book”, reduced to its briefest
and simplest expression. In order to transform one idea into
another, or to prove the identity of two quite different things, a few
intermediate links are sought which partly by their meaning, partly
by their etymology and partly by their mere sound can be used to
establish an apparent connection between the two basic ideas. These
links are then appended to the first idea in the form of an apposition,

a See this volume, p. 422. — Ed.

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275

and in such a way that one gets farther and farther away from the
starting-point and nearer and nearer to the point one wants to reach.
If the chain of appositions has got so far that one can draw a
conclusion without any danger, the final idea is likewise fastened on
in the form of an apposition by means of a dash, and the trick is
done. This is a highly recommendable method of insinuating
thoughts, which is the more effective the more it is made to serve as
the lever for the main arguments. When this trick has been
successfully performed several times, one can, following Saint
Sancho’s procedure, gradually omit some of the intermediate links
and finally reduce the series of appositions to a few absolutely
essential hooks.

The apposition, as we have seen above, can also be reversed and
thus lead to new, even more complicated tricks and more astounding
results. We have seen there, too, that the apposition is the logical
form of the infinite series of mathematics.3

Saint Sancho employs the apposition in two ways: on the one hand,
purely logically, in the canonisation of the world, where it enables
him to transform any earthly thing into “the holy”, and, on the
other hand, historically, in disquisitions on the connection of various
epochs and in summing them up, each historical stage being reduced
to a single word, and the final result is that the last link of the
historical series has not got us an inch farther than the first, and in
the end all the epochs of the series are combined in a single abstract
category like idealism, dependence on thoughts, etc. If the historical
series of appositions is to be given the appearance of progress, this is
achieved by regarding the concluding phrase as the completion of
the first epoch of the series, and the intermediate links as ascending
stages of development leading to the final, culminating phrase.

Alongside the apposition we have synonymy, which Saint Sancho
exploits in every way. If two words are etymologically linked or are
merely similar in sound, they are made responsible for each other, or
if one word has different meanings, then, according to need, it is
used sometimes in one sense and sometimes in the other, while Saint
Sancho makes it appear that he is speaking of one and the same thing
in different “refractions”. Further, a special branch of synonymy
consists of translation, where a French or Latin expression is
supplemented by a German one which only half-expresses it, and in
addition denotes something totally different; as we saw above, for
example, when the word “ respektieren” was translated “to experience
reverence and fear”, and so on. One recalls the words Staat, Status,

a See this volume, p. 156. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Stand, Notstand, etc.a In the section on communism we have already
had the opportunity of observing numerous examples of this use of
ambiguous expressions. Let us briefly examine an example of
etymological synonymy.

“The word ‘ Gesellschaf t’b is derived from the word ‘Sal’. If there are many people
in a Saal,c then the Saal brings it about that thev are in society. They are in society
and they constitute at most a salon society, since they talk in conventional salon phrases.
If real intercourse takes place, it should be regarded as independent of society” (p. 286).

Since the “word ‘ Gesellschaf f is derived from ‘SaF” (which,
incidentally, is not true, for the original roots of all words are verbs)
then “Sat” must be equivalent to “Saal”. But “SaG in old
High-German means a building; Kisello, Geselle — from which
Gesellschaft is derived — means a house companion; hence “Saa /” is
dragged in here quite arbitrarily. But that does not matter; “ Saal” is
immediately transformed into “salon”, as though there was not a gap
of about a thousand years and a great many miles between the old
High-German “SaG and the modern French “salon”. Thus society is
transformed into a salon society, in which, according to the German
philistine idea, an intercourse consisting only of phrases takes place
and all real intercourse is excluded. — Incidentally since Saint Max
only aimed at transforming society into “the holy”, he could have
arrived at this by a much shorter route if he had made a somewhat
more accurate study of etymology and consulted any dictionary of
word roots. What a find it would have been for him to discover there
the etymological connection between the words “ Gesellschaft ” and
“ selig ”; Gesellschaft — selig — heilig — das Heilige d — what could look
simpler?

If “Stirner’s” etymological synonymy is correct, then the commu-
nists are seeking the true earldom, the earldom as the holy. As
Gesellschaft comes from Sal, a building, so Graf (Gothic garavjo )
comes from the Gothic ravo, house. Sal, building =ravo, house;
consequently Gesellschaf t= Graf schaftf The prefixes and suffixes are
the same in both words, the root syllables have the same meaning —
hence the holy society of the communists is the holy earldom, the
earldom as the holy — what could look simpler? Saint Sancho had an
inkling of this, when he saw in communism the perfection of the
feudal system, i.e., the system of earldoms.

a See this volume, p. 212. — Ed.
b Society. — Ed.
c Hall, room. — Ed.

Society — blessed — holy — the holy. — Ed.
e Earl. — Ed.

{ Earldom. — Ed.

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277

Synonymy serves our saint, on the one hand, to transform
empirical relations into speculative relations, by using in its
speculative meaning a word that occurs both in practical life and in
philosophical speculation, uttering a few phrases about this specula-
tive meaning and then making out that he has thereby also criticised
the actual relations which this word denotes as well. He does this
with the word speculation. On page 406, “speculation” “appears”
showing two sides as one essence that possesses a “dual manifesta-
tion”— O Szeliga! He rages against philosophical speculation and
thinks he has thereby also settled accounts with commercial specula-
tion, about [which] he knows nothing. On the other hand, this
svnonvmy enables him, a concealed petty bourgeois, to transform
bourgeois relations (see what was said above in dealing with “com-
munism” about the connection between language and bourgeois re-
lations3) into personal, individual relations, which one cannot attack
without attacking the individuality, “peculiarity” and “uniqueness”
of the individual. Thus, for example, Sancho exploits the etymo-
logical connection between Geld!3 and Geltung,c Vermogend and
vermogen ,e etc.

Synonymy, combined with the apposition, provides the main lever
for his conjuring tricks, which we have already exposed on countless
occasions. To give an example how easy this art is, let us also perform
a conjuring trick a, la Sancho.

WechselJ as change, is the law of phenomena, says Hegel, This is the
reason, “Stirner” could continue, for the phenomenon of the
strictness of the law against false bills of exchange; for we see here the
law raised above phenomena, the law as such, holy law, the law as the
hoiv, the holy itself, against which sin is committed and which is
avenged in the punishment. Or in other words: Wechsel “in its dual
manifestation”, as a bill of exchange ( lettre de change) and as change
( changement ), leads to Verfall8 (echeance and decadence ). Decline as a
result of change is observed in history, inter alia, in the fall of the
Roman Empire, feudalism, the German Empire and the domination
of Napoleon. The “transition from” these great historical crises “to”
the commercial crises of our day “is not difficult”, and this explains
also why these commercial crises are always determined by the expiry
of bills of exchange.

d See this volume, p. 231. — Ed.
b Money. — Ed.
c Worth, value, validity. — Ed.

Wealth, property, ability, capability.-; — Ed.
e To be able, capable. — Ed.

Change, bill of exchange. — Ed.

8 Expiry, falling due (of bill); decline, decay. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Or he could also, as in the case of “ Vermogen ” and “Geld' , justify
the “ Wechsel” etymologically arid “from a certain point of view argue
approximately as follows”. The communists want, among other
things, to abolish the Wechsel (bill of exchange). But does not the
main pleasure of the world lie precisely in Wechsel (change)? They
want, therefore, the dead, the immobile, China — that is to say, the
perfect Chinese is a communist. “Hence” communist declamations
against Wechselbrieie a and Wechsler. As though every letter were not
a Wechselbriei, a letter that notes a change, and every man not a
Wechselnder, a Wechsler.

To give the simplicity of his construction and logical tricks the
appearance of great variety, Saint Sancho needs the episode. From
time to time he “ episodically ” inserts a passage which belongs to
another part of the book, or which could quite well have been left out
altogether, and thus still further breaks the thread of his so-called
argument, which has already been repeatedly broken without that.
This is accompanied by the naive statement that “we” “do not stick
to the rules”, and after numerous repetitions causes in the reader a
certain insensitiveness to even the greatest incoherence. When one
reads “the book”, one becomes accustomed to everything and finally
one readily submits even to the worst. Incidentally, these episodes (as
was only [to be] expected from Saint Sancho) are themselves only
imaginary and mere repetitions under [other guises] of phrases
encountered hundreds of times [already].

After Saint Max has [thus displayed] his personal qualities, and
then revealed himself as [“ appearance" and] as “ essence ” in the distin-
ction, [in] synonymy and in the episode, [we] come [to the] true
culmination and completion of logic, the “concept”.

[The] concept is the “ego” (see Hegel’s Logik, Part 3), logic [as the
ego]. This is the pure relation [of the] ego to the world, a relation
[divested] of all the real relations that exist for it; [a formula] for
all the equations to [which the holy] man reduces mundane
[concepts]. It was already [revealed] above that by applying this
formula to all sorts of things Sancho merely makes an unsuccessful
“attempt” to understand the various pure determinations of
reflection, such as identity, antithesis, etc.

Let us begin at once with a definite example, e.g., the relation
between the “ego” and the people.

* Here and above the authors play on the different meanings of the words Wechsel
(change, bill of exchange), Wechselbrief (bill of exchange), Wechsler (money-changer)
and Wechselnder (a changing person). — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 279

I am not the people.

The people = non-I
I = the non-people.

Hence, I am the negation of the people, the people is dissolved in
me.

The second equation can be expressed also by an auxiliary
equation:

The people’s ego is non-existent,
or:

The ego of the people is the negation of my ego.

The whole trick, therefore, consists in: 1) that the negation which
at the outset belonged to the copula is attached first to the subject
and then to the predicate; and 2) that the negation, the “not”, is,
according to convenience, regarded as an expression of dissimilarity,
difference, antithesis or direct dissolution. In the present example it
is regarded as absolute dissolution, as complete negation; we shall
find that — at Saint Max’s convenience — it is used also in the other
meanings. Thus the tautological proposition that I am not the people
is transformed into the tremendous new discovery that I am the
dissolution of the people.

For the equations given above, it was not even necessary for Saint
Sancho to have any idea of the people; it was enough for him to
know that I and the people are “totally different names for totally
different things”; it was sufficient that the two words do not have a
single letter in common. If now there is to be further speculation
about the people from the standpoint of egoistical logic, it suffices to
attach any kind of trivial determination to the people and to “I”
from outside, from day-to-day experience, thus giving rise to new
equations. At the same time it is made to appear that different
determinations are being criticised in different ways. We shall now
proceed to speculate in this manner about freedom, happiness and
wealth :

Basic equations: The people — non-I.

Equation No. 1: Freedom of the people = Not my freedom.

Freedom of the people = My non-freedom.

Freedom of the people = My lack of freedom.

(This can also be reversed, resulting in the grand proposition: My
lack of freedom = slavery is the freedom of the people.)

Equation No. 2: Happiness of the people = Not my happiness.

Happiness of the people = My non-happiness.

Happiness of the people = My unhappiness.

1 1 —2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

(Reversed equation: My unhappiness, my distress, is the happiness
of the people.)

Equation No. 3: Wealth of the people = Not my wealth.

Wealth of the people = My non-wealth.

Wealth of the people = My poverty.

(Reversed equation: My poverty is the wealth of the people.) This
can be continued ad libitum and extended to other determinations.

For the formation of such equations all that is required, apart from
a very general acquaintance with such ideas as Stirner can combine in
one notion with “people”, is to know the positive expression for the
result obtained in the negative form, e.g., “poverty” — for “non-
wealth”, etc. That is to say, as much knowledge of the language as
one acquires in everyday life is quite sufficient to arrive in this way at
the most surprising discoveries.

The entire trick here, therefore, consisted in transforming
not-my-wealth, not-my-happiness, not-my-freedom into my non-
wealth, my non-happiness, my non-freedom. The “not”, which in
the first equation is a general negation that can express all possible
forms of difference, e.g., it may merely mean that it is our common,
and not exclusively my, wealth — this “not” is transformed in the
[second] equation into the negation of my wealth, [my] happiness,
etc., and ascribes to me [non-happiness], unhappiness, slavery.
[Since] I am denied some definite form of wealth, [the people’s]
wealth but by no means [wealth] in general, [Sancho believes
poverty] must be ascribed to me. [But] this is also [brought about] by
expressing my non-freedom in a positive way and so transforming it
into my [“lack of freedom”]. But [my non-freedom] can, of course,
also mean hundreds [of other] things — e.g., my [“lack of freedom]”,
my non-freedom from [my] body, etc.

We started out just now from the second equation: the people =
non-I. We could also have taken the third equation as our starting-
point: I = the non-people, and then, in the case of wealth for
example, according to the same method, it would be proved in the
end that “my wealth is the poverty of the people”. Here, however,
Saint Sancho would not proceed in this way, but would dissolve
altogether the property relations of the people and the people itself,
and then arrive at the following result: my wealth is the destruction
not only of the people’s wealth but of the people itself. This shows
how arbitrarily Saint Sancho acted when he transformed non-wealth
into poverty. Our saint applies these different methods higgledy-
piggledy and exploits negation sometimes in one meaning and
sometimes in another. Even “anyone who has not read Stirner’s
book” “sees at once” ( Wigand , p. 191) what confusions this is liable to
produce.

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281

In just the same way the “ego” “operates” against the state.

I am not the state.

State =non-I.

I = “Negation” of the state.

Nothing of the state=I.

Or in other words: I am the ‘‘creative nothing” in which the state is
swallowed up.

This simple melody can be used to ring the changes with any
subject.

The great proposition that forms the basis of all these equations is:
I am not non-I. This non-I is given various names, which, on the one
hand, can be purely logical, e.g., being-in-itself, other-being, or, on
the other hand, the names of concrete ideas such as the people, state,
etc. In this way the appearance of a development can be produced by
taking these names as the starting-point and gradually reducing
them — with the aid of equations, or a series of appositions — again to
the non-ego, which was their basis at the outset. Since the real
relations thus introduced figure only as different modifications of
the non-ego, and only nominally different modifications at that — no-
thing at all need be said about these real relations themselves. This is
all the more ludicrous since [the real] relations are the relations [of
the individuals] themselves, and declaring them to be relations [of
the non]-ego only proves that one knows nothing about them. The
matter is thereby so greatly simplified that even “the great majority
consisting of innately limited intellects” can learn the trick in ten
minutes at most. At the same time, this gives us a criterion of the
“uniqueness” of Saint Sancho.

Saint* Sancho further defines the non-ego opposed to the ego as
being that which is alien to the ego, that which is the alien. The
relation of the non-ego to the ego is “therefore” that of alienation
[ Entfremdung ]. We have just given the logical formula by which
Saint Sancho presents any object or relation whatsoever as that which
is alien to the ego, as the alienation of the ego; on the other hand,
Saint Sancho can, as we shall see, also present any object or relation
as something created by the ego and belonging to it Apart, first of all,
from the arbitrary way in which he presents, or does not present, any
relation as a relation of alienation (for everything can be made to fit
in the above equations), we see already here that his only concern is
to present all actual relations, [and also] actual individuals, [as
alienated] (to retain this philosophical [expression] for the time
being), to [transform] them into the wholly [abstract] phrase of
alienation. Thus [instead] of the task of describing [actual] individu-
als in their [actual] alienation and in the empirical relations of this

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alienation, [purely empirical] relations, the same happens here — the
setting forth is replaced by the [mere idea] of alienation, of [the Alien],
of the Holy. [The] substitution of the category of alienation (this is
again a determination of reflection which can be considered as
antithesis, difference, non-identity, etc.) finds its final and highest
expression in “the alien” being transformed again into “the holy”,
and alienation into the relation of the ego to anything whatever as
the holy. We prefer to elucidate the logical process on the basis of
Saint Sancho’s relation to the holy, since this is the predominant
formula, and in passing we note that “the alien” is considered also as
“the existing ” ( per appos.), that which exists apart from me, that
which exists independently of me, per appos., that which is regarded
as independent owing to my non-independence, so that Saint Sancho
can depict as the holy everything that exists independently of him,
e.g., the Blocksberg.85

Because the holy is something alien, everything alien is trans-
formed into the holy; and because everything holy is a bond, a
fetter, all bonds and all fetters are transformed into the holy. By this
means Saint Sancho has already achieved the result that everything
alien becomes for him a mere appearance, a mere idea, from which he
frees himself by simply protesting against it and declaring that he
does not have this idea. Just as we saw in the case of the egoist not in
agreement with himself3 *: people have only to change their conscious-
ness to make everything in the world all right.*5

Our whole exposition has shown that Saint Sancho criticises all
actual conditions by declaring them “the holy”, and combats them by
combating his holy idea of them. This simple trick of transforming
everything into the holy was achieved, as we have already seen in
detail above, by Jacques le bonhomme accepting in good faith the
illusions of philosophy, the ideological, speculative expression of
reality divorced from its empirical basis, for reality, just as he
mistook the illusions of the petty [bourgeois concerning] the
bourgeoisie for the “[holy essence” of the] bourgeoisie, and could
therefore imagine that he was only dealing with thoughts and ideas.
With equal ease people were transformed into the “holy”, for after
their thoughts had been divorced from them themselves and from
their empirical relations, it became possible to consider people as
mere vehicles for these thoughts and thus, for example, the
bourgeois was made into the holy liberal.

The positive relation of [Sancho] — who is in the final analysis

3 See this volume, pp. 249-52. — Ed.

b The words “all right” are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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[pious] — to the holy (a relation [he] calls respect) figures also [under
the] name of “love”. “Love” [is a ] relation that approves of “[man”],
the holy, the ideal, the supreme being, or such a human, holy, ideal,
essential relation. Anything that was elsewhere designated as the
existence of the holy, e.g., the state, prisons, torture, police, trade and
traffic, etc., can also be regarded by Sancho as “another example” of
“love”. This new nomenclature enables him to write new chapters
about what he has already utterly rejected under the trade mark of
the holy and respect. It is the old story of the goats of the
shepherdess Torralva, in a holy form. And as at one time, with the
aid of this story, he led his master by the nose, so now he leads
himself and the public by the nose throughout the book without,
however, being able to break off his story as wittily as he did in those
earlier times when he was still a secular armour-bearer. In general,
since his canonisation Sancho has lost all his original mother wit.

The first difficulty appears to arise because this holy is in itself very
diverse, so that when criticising some definite holy thing one ought
to leave the holiness out of account and criticise the definite content
itself. Saint Sancho avoids this rock by presenting everything definite
as merely an “ example ” of the holy; just as in Hegel’s Logik it is
immaterial whether atom or personality is adduced to explain
“being-for-itself”, or the solar system, magnetism or sexual love as
an example of attraction. It is, therefore, by no means an accident
that “the book” teems with examples, but is rooted in the innermost
essence of the method of exposition employed in it. This is the
“unique” possibility which Saint Sancho has of producing an
appearance of some sort of content, the prototype of which is already
to be found in Cervantes, since Sancho also speaks all the time in
examples. Thus Sancho is able to say: “Another example of the
holy” (the uninteresting) “is labour”. He could have continued:
another example is the state, another is the family, another is rent of
land, another is Saint Jacob (Saint-Jacques, le bonhomme), another is
Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins.86 Indeed, in his
imagination, all these things have this in common: that they are the
“holy”. But at the same time they are totally different things, and it is
just this that constitutes their specific nature. Insofar as one speaks
of their specific nature, one does not speak of them as “the holy”.

[Labour is] not rent of land, and [rent of land] is not the state; [the
main] thing, therefore, is to define [what] the state, land rent and
labour are [apart from] their imagined holiness, [and Saint] Max
achieves this in the following way. [He pretends to] be speaking
about the state, [labour,] etc., and then calls [“the” state] the reality
of some [sort of idea] — of love, of [being]-for-one-another, of the

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existing, of power over [individuals], and — by means [of a] dash — of
“the holy”, but [he could] have said [that at the] outset. Or [he says]
of labour that it is regarded as a life task, [a vocation, a]
destiny — “the holy”. That is to say, the state and labour are first of all
brought under a particular kind of the holy which has been previous-
ly prepared in the same way, and this particular holy is then again
dissolved in the universal “holy”; all of which can take place without
saying anything about labour and the state. The same stale cud can
then be chewed over again on any convenient occasion, because
everything that is apparently the object of criticism serves our
Sancho merely as an excuse for declaring that the abstract ideas and
the predicates transformed into subjects (which are nothing but
suitably assorted holies, a sufficient store of which is always kept in
reserve) are what they were made to be at the outset, viz., the holy. He
has in fact reduced everything to its exhaustive, classic expression, by
saying of it that it is “another example of the holy”. The definitions
which he has picked up by hearsay, and which are supposed to relate
to content, are altogether superfluous, and on closer examination it
is found, too, that they introduce neither definition nor content and
amount to no more than ignorant banalities. This cheap “virtuosity
of thought” which polishes off any subject-matter whatever even
before knowing anything about it, can of course be acquired by
anyone, and not in ten minutes, as previously [stated],3 but even in
five. In the “Commentary” Saint Sancho threatens us with “ treatises ”
about Feuerbach, socialism, bourgeois society, and only the holy
knows what else. Provisionally we can already here reduce these
treatises to their simplest expression as follows:

First treatise: Another example of the holy is Feuerbach.

Second treatise: Another example of the holy is socialism.

Third treatise: Another example of the holy is bourgeois society.

Fourth treatise: Another example of the holy is the “treatise” in
the Stirner manner.

Etc., in infinitum.

A little reflection shows that the second rock against which Saint
Sancho was bound to suffer shipwreck was his own assertion that
every individual is totally different from every other, is unique. Since
every individual is an altogether different being, hence an other-
being, it is by no means necessary that what is alien, holy, for one
individual should be so for another individual; it even rannot be so.
And the common name used, such as state, religion, morality, etc.,
should not mislead us, for these names are only abstractions from the
actual attitude of separate individuals, and these objects, in

See this volume, p. 281. — Ed.

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consequence of the totally different attitude towards them of the
unique individuals, become for each of the latter unique objects,
hence totally different objects, which have only their name in
common. Consequently, Saint Sancho could at most have said: for
me, Saint Sancho, the state, religion, etc., are the alien, the holy.
Instead of this he has to make them the absolutely holy, the holy for
all individuals — how else could he have fabricated his constructed
ego, his egoist in agreement with himself, etc., how else could he at
all have written his whole “book”? How little it occurs to him to make
each “unique” the measure of his own “uniqueness”, how much he
uses his own “uniqueness” as a measure, as a moral norm, to be
applied to all other individuals, like a true moralist forcing them into
his Procrustean bed, is already evident, inter alia, from his judgment
on the departed and forgotten Klopstock, whom he opposes with the
moral maxim that he ought to have adopted an “attitude to religion
altogether his own”; in that case he would have arrived not at a
religion of his own, which would be the correct conclusion (a
conclusion that “Stirner” himself draws innumerable times, e.g., in
regard to money), but at a “dissolution and swallowing up of
religion” (p. 85), a universal result instead of an individual, unique
result. As though Klopstock had not arrived at a “dissolution and
swallowing up of religion”, and indeed at a quite individual, unique
dissolution, such as only this unique Klopstock could have
“achieved”, a dissolution whose uniqueness “Stirner” could have
easily seen even from the many unsuccessful imitations. Klopstock’s
attitude to religion is supposed to be not his “own”, although it was
altogether peculiar to him, and indeed was a relation to religion
which made Klopstock Klopstock. His attitude to religion would
have been “peculiar” a only if he had behaved towards it not like
Klopstock but like a modern German philosopher.

The “egoist in the ordinary sense”, who is not so docile as Szeliga
and who has already above put forward all sorts of objections, here
makes the following retort to our saint: here in the actual world, as I
know very well, I am concerned with my own advantage and nothing
else, rien pour la gloiref Besides this, I enjoy thinking that I am
immortal and can have advantages also in heaven. Ought I to
sacrifice this egoistical conception for the sake of the mere con-
sciousness of egoism in agreement with itself, which will not bring
me in a farthing? The philosophers tell me: that is inhuman. What
do I care? Am I not a human being? Is not everything I do human,

'* A play on the word eigen, which can mean one’s own, belonging to oneself or
peculiar, strange, etc. — Ed.

Mere honour is worth nothing. — Fd.

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and human because I do it, and is it any concern of mine how
“others” “classify” my actions? You, Sancho, who indeed are also a
philosopher, but a bankrupt one — and because of your philosophy
you deserve no financial credit, and because of your bankruptcy you
deserve no intellectual credit — you tell me that my attitude to
religion is not one peculiar to me. What you say, therefore, is the
same as what the other philosophers tell me, but in your case, as
usual, it loses all meaning since you call “peculiar” what they call
“human”. Could you speak of any other peculiarity than your own
and transform your own relation again into a universal one? In my
own way, my attitude to religion, if you like, is also a critical one.
Firstly, I have no hesitation in sacrificing it, as soon as it attempts to
interfere in my commerce; secondly, in my business affairs it is
useful for me to be regarded as religious (as it is useful for my
proletarian, if the pie that I eat here he eats at least in heaven); and,
finally, I turn heaven into my property. It is une propriete ajoutee a la
propriete ,a although already Montesquieu, who was of course a quite
different type of man from you, tried to make me believe that it is
une terreur ajoutee a la terreurP My attitude to heaven is not like that of
any other person, and by virtue of the unique attitude that I adopt
towards it, it is a unique object, a unique heaven. At most, therefore,
you are criticising your idea of my heaven, but not my heaven. And
now immortality! Here you become simply ridiculous. I deny my
egoism — as you assert to please the philosophers — because I
immortalise it and declare the laws of nature and thought null and
void, as soon as they want to give my existence a determination which
is not produced by me myself and is highly unpleasant for me,
namely, death. You call immortality “tedious stability” — as though I
could not always live an “eventful” life so long as trade is flourishing
in this or the other world and I can do business in other things than
your “book”. And what can be “more stable” than death, which
against my will puts an end to my movement and submerges me in
the universal, nature, the species, the holy? And now the state, law,
police! For many an “ego” they may appear to be alien powers; but I
know that they are my own powers. Incidentally — and at this point
the bourgeois, this time with a gracious nod of the head, again turns
his back on our saint — as far as I am concerned, go on blustering
against religion, heaven, God and so on. I know all the same that in
everything that interests me — private property, value, price, money,
purchase and sale — you always perceive something “peculiar”.

a Property added to property. — Ed.
b Terror added to terror. — E<1.

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We have just seen how individuals differ from one another. But
every individual again is diverse in himself. Thus, by reflecting
himself in one of these qualities, i.e., by regarding, defining his “ego”
through one of these determinations, Saint Sancho can define the
object of the other qualities and these other qualities themselves as
the alien, the holy; and so in turn with all his qualities. Thus, for
example, that which is object for his flesh is the holy for his spirit, or
that which is object for his need of rest is the holy for his need of
movement. His transformation, described above, of all action and
inaction into self-denial is based on this trick. Moreover, his ego is no
real ego, but only the ego of the equations given above, the same ego
that in formal logic, in the theory of propositions, figures as
Caius.87

“Another example”, namely, a more general example of the
canonisation of the world, is the transformation of real collisions,
i.e., collisions between individuals and their actual conditions of life,
into ideal collisions, i.e., into collisions between these individuals and
the ideas which they form or get into their heads. This trick, too, is
extremely simple. As Saint Sancho earlier made the thoughts of
individuals into something existing independently, so here he
separates the ideal reflection of real collisions from these collisions
and turns this reflection into something existing independently. The
real contradictions in which the individual finds himself are
transformed into contradictions of the individual with his idea or, as
Saint Sancho also expresses it more simply, into contradictions with
the idea as such, with the holy. Thus he manages to transform the real
collision, the prototype of its ideal copy, into the consequence of this
ideological pretence. Thus he arrives at the result that it is not a
question of the practical abolition of the practical collision, but only
of renouncing the idea of this collision, a renunciation which he, as a
good moralist, insistently urges people to carry out.

After Saint Sancho has thus transformed all the contradictions and
collisions in which the individual finds himself into mere contradic-
tions and collisions of the individual with one or other of his ideas, an
idea which has become independent of him and has subordinated
him to itself, and, therefore, is “easily” transformed into the idea as
such, the holy idea, the holy — after this there remains only one thing
for the individual to do: to commit the sin against the Holy Spirit, to
abstract from this idea and declare the holy to be a spectre. This
logical swindle, which the individual performs on himself, our saint
regards as one of the greatest efforts of the egoist. On the other
hand, however, anyone can see how easy it is in this way to declare
that from the egoistical point of view all historically occurring

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conflicts and movements are subsidiary, without knowing anything
about them. To do this one has only to extract a few of the phrases
usually adopted in such cases, to transform them, in the manner
indicated, into “the holy”, to depict the individuals as being
subordinated to this holy, and to put oneself forward as one who
despises “the holy as such”.

A further offshoot of this logical trick, and indeed our saint’s
favourite manoeuvre, is the exploitation of the words designation,
vocation, task, etc., thereby immensely facilitating the transforma-
tion of whatever he likes into the holy. For, in vocation, designation,
task, etc., the individual appears in his own imagination as something
different from what he actually is, as the alien, hence as the holy, and
in opposition to his real being he asserts his idea of what he ought to
be as the rightful, the ideal, the holy. Thus, when it is necessary for
him, Saint Sancho can transform everything into the holy by means
of the following series of appositions: to designate oneself, i.e., to
choose a designation (insert here any content you like) for oneself; to
choose the designation as such; to choose a holy designation, to
choose a designation as the holy, i.e., to choose the holy as
designation. Or: to be designated, i.e., to have a designation, to have
the designation, the holy designation, designation as the holy, the
holy as designation, the holy for designation, the designation of the
holy.

And now, of course, it only remains for him strongly to admonish
people to select for themselves the designation of absence of any
designation, the vocation of absence of any vocation, the task of
absence of any task — although throughout “the book”, “up to and
including” the “Commentary”, he does nothing but select designa-
tions for people, set people tasks and, like a prophet in the
wilderness, call them to the gospel of true egoism, about whom, of
course, it is said: many are called but only one — O'Connell — is
chosen.3

We have already seen above how Saint Sancho separates the ideas
of individuals from the conditions of their life, from their practical
collisions and contradictions, in order then to transform them into
the holy. Now these ideas appear in the form of designation , vocation,
task. For Saint Sancho vocation has a double form; firstly as the
vocation which others choose for me — examples of which we have
already had above in the case of the newspapers that are full of
politics and the prisons that our saint mistook for houses of moral

a Cf. Matthew 20:16 (“for many be called, but few chosen”). See also this volume,
p. 249. — Ed.

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correction.*2 Afterwards vocation appears also as a vocation in which
the individual himself believes. If the ego is divorced from all its
empirical conditions of life, its activity, the conditions of its existence,
if it is separated from the world that forms its basis and from its own
body, then, of course, it has no other vocation and no other
designation than that of representing the Caius of the logical
proposition and to assist Saint Sancho in arriving at the equations
given above. In the real world, on the other hand, where individuals
have needs, they thereby already have a vocation and task; and at the
outset it is still immaterial whether they make this their vocation in
their imagination as well. It is clear, however, that because the
individuals possess consciousness they form an idea of this vocation
which their empirical existence has given them and, thus, furnish
Saint Sancho with the opportunity of seizing on the word vocation,
that is, on the mental expression of their actual conditions of life, and
of leaving out of account these conditions of life themselves. The
proletarian, for example, who like ‘every human being has the
vocation of satisfying his needs and who is not in a position to satisfy
even the needs that he has in common with all human beings, the
proletarian whom the necessity to work a 14-hour day debases to the
level of a beast of burden, whom competition degrades to a mere
thing, an article of trade, who from his position as a mere productive
force, the sole position left to him, is squeezed out by other, more
powerful productive forces — this proletarian is, if only for these
reasons, confronted with the real task of revolutionising his
conditions. He can, of course, imagine this to be his “vocation”, he
can also, if he likes to engage in propaganda, express his “vocation”
by saying that to do this or that is the human vocation of the
proletarian, the more so since his position does not even allow him to
satisfy the needs arising directly from his human nature. Saint
Sancho does not concern himself with the reality underlying this
idea, with the practical aim of this proletarian — he clings to the word
“vocation” and declares it to be the holy, and the proletarian to be a
servant of the holy — the easiest way of considering himself superior
and “proceeding further”.

Particularly in the relations that have existed hitherto, when one

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] We have already
earlier discussed at length this kind of vocation where one of the conditions of the life
of a class is singled out by the individuals constituting this class and put forward as a
general demand to all men, where the bourgeois makes politics and morals, the
existence of which is indispensable to him, the vocation of all men.

J See this volume, pp. 161-62. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

class always ruled, when the conditions of life of an individual always
coincided with the conditions of life of a class, when, therefore, the
practical task of each newly emerging class was bound to appear to
each of its members as a universal task, and when each class could
actually overthrow its predecessor only by liberating the individuals
of all classes from certain chains which had hitherto fettered
them — under these circumstances it was essential that the task of the
individual members of a class striving for domination should be
described as a universal human task.

Incidentally, when for example the bourgeois tells the proletarian
that his, the proletarian’s, human task is to work fourteen hours a
day, the proletarian is quite justified in replying in the same
language that on the contrary his task is to overthrow the entire
bourgeois system.

We have already repeatedly seen how Saint Sancho puts forward a
whole series of tasks all of which resolve themselves into the final
task, which exists for all people, that of true egoism. But even where
he does not reflect, and does not see himself as creator and creation,
he manages to arrive at a task by means of the following trashy
distinction.

Page 466: “Whether you want to continue to occupy yourself with thinking
depends on you. If you wish to achieve anything substantial in thinking, then” (the
conditions and designations begin for you) “then ... anyone who wishes to think,
therefore, certainly has a task, which by having that wish he sets himself, consciously or
unconsciously; but no one has the task of thinking.”

First of all, apart from any other content of this proposition, it is
incorrect even from Saint Sancho’s own viewpoint, since the egoist in
agreement with himself, whether he wishes it or not, certainly has the
“task” of thinking. He must think, on the one hand, to keep in check
the flesh, which can be tamed only through the spirit, through
thought, and, on the other hand, to be able to fulfil his reflective
determination as creator and creation. Consequently he sets the
whole world of deceived egoists the “task” of knowing themselves — a
“task” which, of course, cannot be accomplished without thought.

In order to change this proposition from the form of trashy
distinction into a logical form, one must first of all get rid of the term
“substantial”. For each person the “substantial” that he wishes to
achieve in thought is something different, depending on his degree
of education, the conditions of his life and his aim at the time. Saint
Max, therefore, does not give us here any firm criterion for
determining when the task begins which one sets oneself by thinking
and how far one can go in thought without setting oneself any
task — he limits himself to the relative expression “substantial”. But

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for me everything is “substantial” that induces me to think,
everything about which I think is “substantial”. Therefore instead
of: “if you want to achieve anything substantial in thinking”, it
should read: “if you want to think at all”. This depends, however, not
at all on your wishing or not wishing, since you possess consciousness
and can satisfy your needs only by an activity in which you have to
use your consciousness as well. Further, the hypothetical form must
be got rid of. “If you want to think” — then from the outset you are
setting yourself the “task” of thinking; Saint Sancho had no need to
proclaim this tautological statement with such pomposity. The whole
proposition was only clothed in this form of trashy distinction and
pompous tautology in order to conceal the content: as a definite
person, an actual person, you have a designation , a task, whether you
are conscious of it or not.* It arises from your need and the
connection of the latter with the existing world. Sancho’s real wisdom
lies in his assertion that it depends on your will whether you think,
live, etc., whether in general you possess any sort of determinateness.
He is afraid that otherwise determination would cease to be your
self-determination. When you equate your self with your reflection,
or according to need, with your will, then it is obvious that in this
abstraction everything that is not posited by your reflection or your
will is not self-determination — therefore also, for example, your
breathing, your blood circulation, thought, life, etc. For Saint
Sancho, however, self-determination does not even consist in will
but, as we saw already in regard to the true egoist,3 in the reservatio
mentalis of indifference to any kind of determinateness — an indiffer-
ence which reappears here as absence of determination. In his
“own” series of appositions this would assume the following form: as
opposed to all real determination, he chooses absence of determina-
tion as his determination, at each moment he distinguishes between
himself and the undeterminated, thus at each moment he is also
some other than he is, a third person, and indeed the other pure and
simple, the holy other, the other counterposed to all uniqueness, the
undeterminated, the universal, the ordinary — the ragamuffin.

If Saint Sancho saves himself from determination by his leap into
absence of determination (which is itself a determination and indeed

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] You cannot live, eat,
sleep, you cannot move or do anvthing at all without at the same time setting yourself a
task, without designation — this is a theory, therefore, which, instead of getting away
from the setting of tasks, from voc ations, etc., as it pretends to do, is even more intent
on transforming every manifestation of life, and even life itself, into a “task”.

See this volume, pp. 261-62. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the worst of all), then the practical, moral content of this whole trick,
apart from what was said above in connection with the true egoist, is
merely an apology for the vocation forced on every individual in the
world as it has existed so far. If, for example, the workers assert in
their communist propaganda that the vocation, designation, task of
every person is to achieve all-round development of all his abilities,
including, for example, the ability to think, Saint Sancho sees in this
only the vocation to something alien, the assertion of “the holy”. He
seeks to free them from this by defending the individual who has
been crippled by the division of labour at the expense of his abilities
and relegated to a one-sided vocation against his own need to become
different, a need which has been stated to be his vocation by others.
What is here asserted in the form of a vocation, a designation, is
precisely the negation of the vocation that has hitherto resulted in
practice from the division of labour, i.e., the only actually existing
vocation — hence, the negation of vocation altogether. The all-round
realisation of the individual will only cease to be conceived as an
ideal, a vocation, etc., when the impact of the world which stimulates
the real development of the abilities of the individual is under the
control of the individuals themselves, as the communists desire.

Finally, in the egoistical logic all the twaddle about vocation has
moreover the purpose of making it possible to introduce the holy
into things and to enable us to destroy them without having to touch
them. Thus, for example, one person or another regards work,
business affairs, etc., as his vocation. Thereby these become holy
work, holy business affairs, the holy. The true egoist does not regard
them as vocation; thereby he has dissolved holy work and holy
business affairs. So they remain what they are and he remains what
he was. It does not occur to him to investigate whether work,
business affairs, etc., these modes of existence of individuals, by their
real content and process of development necessarily lead to those
ideological notions which he combats as independent beings, or,
to use his expression, which he canonises.

Just as Saint Sancho canonises communism in order later, in
connection with the union, the better to palm off his holy idea of
it as his “own” invention, so, in exactly the same way, he blusters
against “vocation, designation, task” merely in order to reproduce
them throughout his book as the categorical imperative. Wherever
difficulties arise, Sancho hacks his way through them by means of a
categorical imperative such as “turn yourself to account”, “recognise
vourself”, “let each become an all-powerful ego”, etc. On the
categorical imperative, see the section on the “union”; on
“vocation”, etc., see the section on “self-enjoyment”.

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293

We have now revealed the chief logical tricks Saint Sancho uses to
canonise the existing world and thereby to criticise and consume it.
Actually, however, he consumes only the holy in the world, without
even touching the world itself. Hence it is obvious that he has to
remain wholly conservative in practice. If he wanted to criticise, then
earthly criticism would begin just where any possible halo ends. The
more the normal form of intercourse of society, and with it the
conditions of the ruling class, develop their contradiction to the
advanced productive forces, and the greater the consequent discord
within the ruling class itself as well as between it and the class ruled
by it, the more fictitious, of course, becomes the consciousness which
originally corresponded to this form of intercourse (i.e., it ceases to
be the consciousness corresponding to this form of intercourse),
and the more do the old traditional ideas of these relations of
intercourse, in which actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed
as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases,
conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is
exposed by life, and the less meaning they have for consciousness
itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical,
moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society. The
more hypocritical this society becomes, the easier it is for such a
credulous man as Sancho to discover everywhere the idea of the
holy, the ideal. From the universal hypocrisy of society he, the
credulous, can deduce universal faith in the holy, the domination of
the holy, and can even mistake this holy for the pedestal of existing
society. He is the dupe of this hypocrisy, from which he should have
drawn exactly the opposite conclusion.

The world of the holy is in the final analysis epitomised in “man”.
As we have already seen throughout the Old Testament, Sancho
regards “man” as the active subject on which the whole of previous
history is based; in the New Testament he extends this domination of
“man” to the whole of the existing, contemporary physical and
spiritual world, and also to the properties of the individuals at
present existing. Everything belongs to “man” and thus the world is
transformed into the “world of man”. The holy as a person is
“man”, which for Sancho is only another name for the concept, the
idea. The conceptions and ideas of people, separated from actual
things, are bound, of course, to have as their basis not actual
individuals, but the individual of the philosophical conception, the
individual separated from his actuality and existing only in thought,
“man” as such, the concept of man. With this, his faith in philosophy
reaches its culmination.

Now that everything has been transformed into “the holy” or into

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what belongs to “man”, our saint is enabled to proceed further to
appropriation, by renouncing the idea of “the holy” or of “man” as a
power standing above him. Owing to the alien having been
transformed into the holy, into a mere idea, this idea of the alien,
which he mistakes for the actually existing alien, is of course his
property. The basic formulas for the appropriation of the world of
man (the way in which the ego gains possession of the world when it
no longer has any respect for the holy) are already contained in the
equations given above.

As we have seen, Saint Sancho is already master of his qualities as
the egoist in agreement with himself. In order to become master of
the world, all he has to do is to make it one of his qualities. The
simplest way of doing so is for Sancho to proclaim the quality of
“man”, with all the nonsense contained in this, directly as his quality.
Thus he claims for himself, for example, as a quality of the ego, the
nonsense of universal love of mankind by asserting that he loves
“everyone” (p. 387) and indeed with the consciousness of egoism, for
“love makes him happy”. A person who has such a happy nature,
indubitably belongs to those of whom it is said: Woe unto you if you
offend even one of these little ones! a

The second method is that Saint Sancho tries to preserve
something as a quality of his, while he transforms it — when it seems
necessary to him as a relation — into a relation, a mode of existence, of
“man”, a holy relation, and thereby repudiates it. Saint Sancho does
this even when the quality, separated from the relation through
which it is realised, becomes pure nonsense. Thus, for example, on
page 322 he wants to preserve national pride by declaring that
“nationality is one of his qualities and the nation his owner and
master”. He could have continued: religiousnesses a quality of mine, I
have no intention of renouncing it as one of my qualities — religion is
my master, the holy. Family love is a quality of mine, the family is my
master. Justice is a quality of mine, the law is my master; to engage
in politics is a quality of mine, the state is my master.

The third method of appropriation is employed when some alien
power whose force he experiences in practice is regarded by him as
holy and spurned altogether without being appropriated. In this case
he sees his own powerlessness in the alien power and recognises this
powerlessness as his property, his creation, above which he always
stands as creator. This, for example, is the case with the state. Here,
too, he fortunately arrives at the point at which he has to deal not
with something alien, but only with a quality of his own, against

Cf. Luke 17: 1-2 .— Ed.

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which he needs only to set himself as creator in order to overcome it.
In an emergency, therefore, the lack of a quality is also taken by him
.as a quality of his. When Saint Sancho is starving to death it is not due
to lack of food, but to his own hungriness, his own quality of starving.
If he falls out of a window and breaks his neck, it happens not
because the force of gravity plunges him downwards, but because
absence of wings, inability to fly, is a quality of his own.

The fourth method, which he employs with the most brilliant
success, consists in declaring that everything that is the object of one
of his qualities, is, since it is his object, his property, because he has a
relation to it by virtue of one of his qualities, irrespective of the
character of this relation. Thus, what has up to now been called
seeing, hearing, feeling, etc., Sancho, this inoffensive acquisitor,
calls: acquiring property. The shop at which I am looking is, as
something seen by me, the object of my eye, and its reflection on my
retina is the possession of my eye. And now the shop, besides its
relation to the eye, becomes his possession and not merely the
possession of his eye — his possession, which is as much upside-down
as the image of the shop on his retina. When the shopkeeper lets
down the shutters (or, as Szeliga puts it, the “blinds and curtains”3),
his property disappears and, like a bankrupt bourgeois, he retains
only the painful memory of vanished brilliance. If “Stirner” passes
by the royal kitchen he will undoubtedly acquire possession of the
smell of the pheasants roasting there, but he will not even see the
pheasants themselves. The only persisting possession that falls to his
share is a more or less vociferous rumbling in his stomach.
Incidentally, what and how much he can see depends not only on the
existing state of affairs in the world, a state of affairs by no means
created by him, but also on his purse and on the position in life which
falls to his lot owing to division of labour, which perhaps shuts away
very much from him, although he may have very acquisitive eyes and
ears.

If Saint Sancho had said simply and frankly that everything that is
the object of his imagination, as an object imagined by him, i.e., as his
idea of an object, is his idea, i.e., his possession (and the same thing
holds with looking at something, etc.), one would only have mar-
velled at the childish naivete of a man who believes that such a triv-
iality is a discovery and a fortune. But the fact that he passes off this
conjectural property as property in general was bound, of course,
to have a magical attraction for the propertyless German ideologists.

The words are from Szeliga’s article “Eugen Sue: ‘Die Geheimnisse von
Paris’ — Ed.

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Every other person in his sphere of action, too, is his object, and
“as his object — his property”, his creature. Each ego says to the
other (see p. 184):

“For me you are only what you are for me” (for example, my exploiteur), “namely
my object and, because my object, my property.”

Hence also my creature, which at any moment as creator I can
swallow up and take back into myself. Thus, each ego regards the
other not as a property-owner, but as his property; not as “ego” (see
[p. 184)] but as being-for-him, as object; not as belonging to himself,
but as belonging to him, to another, as alienated from himself. “Let us
take both for what they give themselves out to be” (p. 187), for
property-owners, for something belonging to themselves, “and for
what they take each other to be”, for property, for something
belonging to the alien. They are property-owners and they are not
property-owners (cf. p. 187). What is important for Saint Sancho,
however, in all relations to others, is not to take the real relation, but
how each can see himself in his imagination, in his reflection.

Since everything that is object for the “ego” is, through the medium
of one or other of his properties, also his object and, therefore, his
property — thus, for example, the beatings he receives as the object of
his members, his feelings and his mind, are his object and, therefore,
his property — he is able to proclaim himself the owner of every
object that exists for him. By this means he can proclaim that the
world surrounding him is his property, and that he is its owner — no
matter how much it maltreats him and debases him to the level of a
“man having only ideal wealth, a ragamuffin”. On the other hand,
since every object for the “ego” is not only my object, but also my
object, it is possible, with the same indifference towards the content,
to declare that every object is not-my-own, alien, holy. One and the
same object and one and the same relation can, therefore, with equal
ease and with equal success be declared to be the holy and my
property. Everything depends on whether stress is laid on the word
“ my ” or on the word “object”. The methods of appropriation and
canonisation are merely two different “refractions” of one “trans-
formation”.

All these methods are merely positive expressions for negating
what was posited as alien to the ego in the above equations; except
that the negation is again, as above, taken in various determinations.
Negation can, firstly, be determined in a purely formal way, so that it
does not at all affect the content — as we saw above in the case of love
of mankind and in all cases when its whole alteration is limited to
introducing consciousness of indifference. Or the whole sphere of
the object or predicate, the whole content, can be negated, as in the

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case of religion and the state. Or, thirdly, the copula alone, my
hitherto alien relation to the predicate, can be negated and the stress
laid on the word “ray” so that my attitude to what is mine is that of
property-owner — in the case of money, for instance, which becomes
coin of my own coining. In this last case both the quality of Man and
his relation can lose all meaning. Every one of the qualities of Man,
by being taken back into myself, is extinguished in my individuality.
It is no longer possible to say what the quality is. It remains only
nominally what it was. As “ mine ”, as determinateness dissolved in
me, it no longer has any determinateness whether in relation to
others'or in relation to me, it is only posited by me, an illusory quality.
Thus, for example, my thought. Just as with my qualities, so with the
things which stand in a relation to me and which, as we have seen
above, are basically also only my qualities — as, for example, in the
case of the shop I am looking at. Insofar, [therefore,] as thought in
me is totally [different] from all [other] qualities, just as, for example,
a jeweller’s shop is totally different from a sausage shop, etc. — the
[difference] emerges again as a difference of appearance, and re-
asserts itself externally too in my manifestation for others. There-
by this annihilated determinateness is fortunately restored and,
insofar as it is at all possible to express it in words, must also be
reproduced in the old expressions. (Incidentally, we shall be hearing
a little more yet concerning Saint Sancho’s non-etymological illusions
about language.)

The simple equation encountered above is here replaced by the
antithesis. In its simplest form it is expressed, for example, as follows:
Man’s thought — my thought, egoistical thought,
where the word my means only that he can also be without thoughts,
so that the word my abolishes thought. The antithesis already becomes
more complicated in the following example:

Money as man’s means of I J Money of my own coining as the

exchange — ( \ egoist’s means of exchange

where the absurdity stands revealed.

The antithesis becomes still more complicated when Saint Max
introduces a determination and wants to create the appearance of a
far-reaching development. Here the single antithesis becomes a
series of antitheses. First of all, for example, it is stated:

Right in general as the right \ j Right is what is right for

of man J \ me,

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where, instead of right, he might equally well have put any other
word, since admittedly it no longer has any meaning. Although this
nonsense continues to crop up all the time, in order to proceed
further he has to introduce another, well-known determination of
right which can be used both in the purely personal and in the
ideological sense — for example, might as the basis of right. Only now,
where the right mentioned in the first thesis has acquired yet another
determination, which is retained in the antithesis, can this antithesis
produce some content. Now we get:

Right — might of Man j. j Might — my right

which then again simply becomes reduced to:

Might as my right=My might.

These antitheses are no more than positive reversals of the
above-mentioned negative equations, in which antitheses continually
proved to be contained in the conclusion. They even surpass those
equations in simple grandeur and great simple-mindedness.

Just as previously Saint Sancho could regard everything as alien, as
existing independently of him, as holy, so now with equal ease he can
regard everything as his own product, as only existing thanks to him,
as his property. Indeed, since he transforms everything into his
qualities, it only remains for him to behave towards them as he
behaves towards his original qualities, in the capacity of the egoist in
agreement with himself, a procedure we do not need to repeat here.
In this way our Berlin school-master becomes the absolute master of
the world — “this, of course, is also the case with every goose, every
dog, every horse” ( Wigand , p. 187).

The real logical experiment, on which all these forms of
appropriation are based, is a mere form of speech, namely a
paraphrase, expressing one relation as a manifestation, as a mode of
existence of another. Just as we have seen that every relation can be
depicted as an example of the relation of property, in exactly the
same way it can be depicted as the relation of love, might,
exploitation, etc. Saint Sancho found this manner of paraphrase
ready-made in philosophical speculation where it plays a very
important part. See below on the “theory of exploitation”.3

The various categories of appropriation become emotional
categories as soon as the appearance of practice is introduced and
appropriation is to be taken seriously. The emotional form of
assertion of the ego against the alien, the holy, the world of “Man”,

See this volume, pp. 411-14. — Ed.

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is bragging. Refusal to revere the holy is proclaimed (reverence,
respect, etc. — these emotional categories serve to express his relation
to the holy or to some third thing as the holy), and this permanent
refusal is entitled a deed, a deed that appears all the more comic
because all the time Sancho is battling only against the spectre of his
own sanctifying conception. On the other hand, since the world,
despite his refusal to revere the holy, treats him in the most ungodly
fashion, he enjoys the inner satisfaction of declaring to the world
that he has only to attain power over it in order to treat it without any
reverence. This threat with its world-shattering reservatio mentalis
completes the comedy. To the first form of bragging belongs Saint
Sancho’s statement on page 16 that he “is not afraid of the anger of
Poseidon, nor of the vengeful Eumenides” , “does not fear the curse”
(p. 58), “desires no forgiveness” (p. 242), etc., and his final assurance
that he commits “the most boundless desecration” of the holy. To
the second form belongs his threat against the moon (p. 218):

“If only I could seize you, I would in truth seize you, and if only I could find a
means to get to you, you would in no way terrify me.... I do not surrender to you, but
am only biding my time. Even if for the present I refrain from having designs on you,
I still have a grudge against you” —

an apostrophe in which our saint sinks below the level of Pfeffel’s
pug-dog in the ditch.88 And likewise on page 425, where he “does
not renounce power over life and death”, etc.

Finally, the practice of bragging [can] again become mere
[practice] within the sphere of theory [by] our holy man [asserting] in
the [most] pompous language that he has performed actions that he
has never performed, and [at the same time] endeavouring by means
of high-sounding phrases to smuggle in traditional trivialities [as] his
original creations. Actually this is characteristic of the entire book,
particularly his construction of history — which is foisted on us as an
exposition of his thought but is only a bad piece of copying
out — then the assurance that “the book” “appears to be written
against man” ( Wigand , p. 168), and a multitude of separate
assertions, such as: “With one puff of the living ego I blow down
whole peoples” (p. 219 of “the book”), “I recklessly attack” (p. 254),
“the people is dead” (p. 285), further thp assurance that he “delves
into the bowels of right” (p. 275), and, finally, the challenging call,
embellished with quotations and aphorisms, for “a flesh-and-blood
opponent” (p. 280).

Bragging is already in itself sentimental. But, in addition,
sentimentality occurs in “the book” as a particular category, which
plays a definite part especially in positive appropriation that is no
longer mere assertion against the alien. However simple the methods

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of appropriation so far examined, with a more detailed exposition
the appearance has to be given that the ego thereby acquires also
property “in the ordinary sense”, and this can only be achieved by a
forcible puffing-up of this ego, by enveloping himself and others in a
sentimental charm. Sentimentality cannot be avoided since, without
previous examination, he claims the predicates of “Man” as his
own — he asserts, for example, that he “loves” “ everyone ” “out of
egoism” — and thus gives his qualities an exuberanL turgidity. Thus,
on page 351, he declares that the “smile of the infant” is “his
property” and in the same passage the stage of civilisation at which
old men are no longer killed off is depicted with the most touching
expressions as the deed of these old men themselves, etc. His attitude
to Maritornes also belongs wholly to this same sentimentality.

The unity of sentimentality and bragging is rebellion. Directed
outwards, against others, it is bragging; directed inwards, as
grumbling-in-oneself, it is sentimentality. It is the specific expression
of the impotent dissatisfaction of the philistine. He waxes indignant
at the thought of atheism, terrorism, communism, regicide, etc. The
object against which Saint Sancho rebels is the holy; therefore
rebellion, which indeed is also characterised as a crime, becomes, in
the final analysis, a sin. It is therefore by no means necessary for
rebellion to take the form of an action, as it is only the “sin” against
“the holy”. Saint Sancho, therefore, is satisfied with “getting”
“holiness” or the “spirit of alienation” “out of his head” and
accomplishing his ideological appropriation. But just as present and
future are altogether confused in his head, and just as he sometimes
asserts that he has already appropriated everything and sometimes
that it has still to be acquired, so in connection with rebellion also
at times it occurs to him quite accidentally that he is still confronted
by the actually existing alien even after he has finished with the halo of
the alien. In this case, or rather in the case of this sudden idea,
rebellion is transformed into an imaginary act, and the ego into
“we”. We shall examine this in more detail later (see “Rebel-
lion”*).

The true egoist, who from the description given so far has proved
to be the greatest conservative, finally collects up the fragments of
the “world of man”, twelve basketfuls; for “far be it that anything
should be lost!” Since his whole activity is limited to trying a few
hackneyed, casuistical tricks on the world of thoughts handed down
to him by philosophical tradition, it is a matter of course that the real
world does not exist for him at all and, therefore, too, remains in

J This volume, pp. 382-83. — Ed.

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existence as before. The content of the New Testament will furnish
us with detailed proof of this.

Thus, “we appear at the bar of majority and are declared of age” (p. 86).

4. Peculiarity

“To create for oneself one’s own world, that means building a heaven for oneself”
(p. 89 of “the book”).*

We have already “penetrated” into the innermost sanctuary of this
heaven; now we shall try to learn “more things” about it. In the New
Testament, however, we shall rediscover the same hypocrisy that
permeated the Old Testament. Just as in the latter the historical data
were only names for a few simple categories, so here in the New
Testament, too, all worldly relations are only disguises, different
designations, for the meagre content which we have assembled in the
“Phenomenology” and “Logic”. Under the appearance of speaking
about the actual world, Saint Sancho always speaks only about these
meagre categories.

“You do not want the freedom to have all these fine things.... You want to have them
in actuality ... to possess them as your property.... You ought to be not only a free person,
but also an owner” (p. 205).

One of the oldest formulas arrived at by the early social move-
ment— the opposition between socialism in its most miserable
form and liberalism — is here exalted into an utterance of the
“egoist in agreement with himself”. How old this opposition is
even for Berlin, our holy man could have seen if only from the fact
that it is mentioned with terror already in Ranke’s Historisch-politische
Zeitschrift, Berlin, 1831.a

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Up to now freedom has
been defined by philosophers in two ways; on the one hand, as power, as domination
over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives — by all
materialists; on the other hand, as self-determination, riddance of the real world, as
merely imaginary freedom of the spirit — this definition was given by all idealists,
especially the German idealists.

Having seen in the “Phenomenology” above how Saint Max’s true egoist seeks his
egoism in dissolution, in achieving riddance, the idealist freedom, it seems strange that
in the chapter on “Peculiarity” he puts forward against “riddance” the opposite
definition, i.e., power over the circumstances which determine him, materialist
freedom.

d Leopold Ranke’s “Einleitung” in Historisch-politische Zeitschrift. I. Band, Ham-
burg. 1832 (the place and date of publication are cited incorrectly in the text). — Ed.

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“How I utilise it” (freedom) “depends on my peculiarity” (p. 205).

The great dialectician can also reverse this and say: “How I utilise
my peculiarity depends on my freedom.” — Then he continues:

“Free — from what?”

Here, therefore, by means of a dash freedom is already
transformed into freedom from something and, per appos., from
“everything”. This time, however, the apposition is given in the form
of a proposition that apparently provides a closer definition. Having
thus achieved this great result, Sancho becomes sentimental.

“Oh, how much can be shaken off!”

First, the “yoke of serfdom”, then a whole series of other yokes, leading
imperceptibly to the result that “the most perfect self-denial is nothing but
freedom, freedom ... from one’s own ego, and the urge towards freedom as something
absolute ... has deprived us of our peculiarity .”

By means of an extremely artless series of yokes, liberation from
serfdom, which was the assertion of the individuality of the serfs and
at the same time the abolition of a definite empirical barrier, is here
equated with the much earlier Christian-idealist freedom of the
Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, thereby transforming
freedom in general into self-denial. At this point we have already
finished with freedom, since it is now indisputably the “holy”. Saint
Max transforms a definite historical act of self -liberation into the
abstract category of “freedom”, and this category is then defined
more closely by means of a totally different historical phenomenon
which can likewise be included under the general conception of
“freedom”. This is the whole trick by which the throwing off of the
yoke of serfdom is transformed into self-denial.

To make his theory of freedom as clear as noonday to the German
burgher, Sancho now begins to declaim in the burgher’s own
language, particularly that of the Berlin burgher:

“But the freer I become, the larger does compulsion loom before my eyes, and
the more powerless do I feel. The unfree son of the wilds is not yet aware of all the
limitations that trouble an ‘educated’ man, he imagines himself freer than the latter.
In proportion as I achieve freedom for myself I create new limits and new tasks for
myself; no sooner have I invented railways than I again feel myself weak because I still
cannot sail through the air like a bird, and I have no sooner solved a problem that was
perplexing my mind than countless others await me,” etc. (pp. 205, 206).

O “clumsy” story-writer for townsman and villager!

Not the “unfree sons of the wilds” but “educated people”
“imagine” the savage freer than the educated man. That the “son of
the wilds” (whom F. Halm brought on the stage3) is ignorant of the

3 Friedrich Halm, Der Sohn der Wildniss. — Ed.

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limitations of the educated man because he cannot experience them
is just as clear as that the “educated” citizen of Berlin, who only
knows the “son of the wilds” from the theatre, knows nothing of the
limitations of the savage. The simple fact is this: the limitations of the
savage are not those of the civilised man. The comparison that our
saint draws between them is the fantastic comparison of an
“educated” Berliner whose education consists of knowing nothing
about either of them. That he knows nothing of the limitations of the
savage is explicable, although after the large number of new travel
books, it is certainly easy enough to know something about them; but
that he is also ignorant of the limitations of the educated man, is
proved by his example of railways and flying. The inactive petty
bourgeois, for whom railways dropped from the sky and who for
that very reason imagines that he invented them himself, begins to
indulge in fantasies about aerial flight after having once travelled by
railway. Actually, the balloon came first and then the railways. Saint
Sancho had to reverse this, for otherwise everyone would have seen
that when the balloon was invented the demand for railways was still
a long way off, whereas the opposite is easy to imagine. In general,
Sancho turns empirical relations upside down. When hackney
carriages and carts no longer sufficed for the growing requirements
of communication, when, inter alia, the centralisation of production
due to large-scale industry necessitated new methods to accelerate
and expand the transport of its mass of products, the locomotive was
invented and thus the use of railways for transport on a large scale.
The inventor and shareholders were interested in their profits, and
commerce in general in reducing production costs; the possibility,
indeed the absolute necessity, of the invention lay in the empirical
conditions. The application of the new invention in the various
countries depended on the various empirical conditions; in America,
for example, on the need to unite the individual states of that vast
area and to link the semi-civilised districts of the interior with the sea
and the markets for their products. (Compare, inter alia,
M. Chevalier, Lettres sur I’Amerique du Nord .) In other countries, for
example in Germany, where every new invention makes people
regret that it does not complete the sum total of inventions — in such
countries after stubbornly resisting these detestable railways which
cannot supply them with wings, people are nevertheless compelled
by competition to accept them in the end and to give up hackney
carriages and carts along with the time-honoured, respectable
spinning-wheel. The absence of other profitable investment of
capital made railway construction the predominant branch of
industry in Germany. The development of her railway construction

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and reverses on the world market went hand in hand. But nowhere
are railways built for the sake of the category “freedom from”; Saint
Max could have realised this even from the fact that no one builds
railways in order to free himself from his money. The real kernel of
the burgher’s ideological contempt for railways due to his longing to
fly like a bird is to be found in his preference for hackney carriages,
vans and country roads. Sancho yearns for his “own world” which, as
we saw above, is heaven. Therefore he wants to replace the
locomotive by Elijah’s fiery chariot and be carried up to heaven.

After the actual tearing down of restrictions — which is at the same
time an extremely positive development of the productive forces,
real energy and satisfaction of urgent requirements, and an
expansion of the power of individuals — after the actual tearing down
of restrictions has been transformed in the eyes of this passive and
ignorant spectator into simple freedom from a restriction, which he
can again logically make into a postulate of freedom from restriction
as such — at the conclusion of the whole argument, we arrive at what
was already presupposed at the beginning:

“To be free from something means only to be relieved of something, to be rid of
something” (p. 206).

He at once gives an extremely unfortunate example: “He is free
of headache is equivalent to saying: he is rid of it”; as though this
“riddance” of headache were not equivalent to a wholly positive
ability to dispose of my head, equivalent to ownership of my head,
while as long as I had a headache T was the property of my sick head.

“In ‘riddance’ — in riddance from sin, from God, from morality, etc. — we
consummate the freedom that Christianity recommends” (p. 206).

Hence our “consummate Christian”, too, finds his peculiarity
only in “riddance” from “thought”, from “determination”, from
“vocation”, from “law”, from “constitution”, etc., and invites his
brothers in Christ to “feel happy only in dissolution”, i.e., in
accomplishing “riddance” and the “consummate”, “Christian
freedom”.

He continues:

“Ought we, perhaps, to renounce freedom because it turns out to be a Christian
ideal? No, nothing should be lost" ( voild notre conservateur tout trouve a), “freedom too
should not be lost, it should however become our own, and it cannot become our own
in the form of freedom” (p. 207).

Here “our egoist” ( toujours et partoutb) “in agreement with

“ There’s the conservative all complete. — Ed.

Always and everywhere. — Ed.

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himself” forgets that already in the Old Testament, thanks to the
Christian ideal of freedom, i.e., thanks to the illusion of freedom, we
became “owners” of the “world of things”; he forgets, likewise, that
accordingly we had only to get rid of the “world of thoughts” to
become “owners” of that world as well, that in this context
“peculiarity” was for him a consequence of freedom, of riddance.

Having interpreted freedom as the state of being free from
something, and this, in turn, as “riddance”, and this as the
Christian ideal of freedom, and hence as the freedom of “Man”, our
saint can, with the material thus prepared, carry through a practical
course of his logic. The first, simplest antithesis reads:

Freedom of Man — My freedom,

where in the antithesis freedom ceases to exist “in the form of
freedom”. Or:

Riddance in the interests I /Riddance in my interests.

of Man ( )

Both these antitheses, with a numerous retinue of declamations,
continually appear throughout the chapter on peculiarity, but with
their help alone our world-conquering Sancho would attain very
little, he would not even attain the island of Barataria. Earlier, when
observing the behaviour of people from his “own world”, from his
“heaven”, he set aside two factors of actual liberation in making his
abstraction of freedom. The first factor was that individuals in their
self-liberation satisfy a definite need actually experienced by them.
As the result of setting aside this factor, “ Man ” has been substituted
for actual individuals, and striving for a fantastic ideal — for freedom
as such, for the “freedom of Man” — has been substituted for the
satisfaction of actual needs.

The second factor was that an ability that has hitherto existed
merely as a potentiality in the individuals who are freeing themselves
begins to function as a real power, or that an already existing power
becomes greater by removal of some restriction. The removal of the
restriction, which is merely a consequence of the new creation of
power, can of course be considered the main thing. But this illusion
arises only if one takes politics as the basis of empirical history, or if,
like Hegel, one wants everywhere to demonstrate the negation of
negation, or finally if, after the new power has been created, one
reflects, as an ignorant citizen of Berlin, on this new creation.

By setting aside this second factor for his own use, Saint Sancho
acquires a determinateness that he can counterpose to the remain-

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

ing, abstract caput mortuum of “freedom”. Thus he arrives at the
following new antitheses:

Freedom, the empty removal of I j Peculiarity, the actual posses-

alien power I \sion of one’s own power.

Or, even:

Freedom, repulsion of alien 1 f Peculiarity, possession of one’s

power j \own power.

To show the extent to which Saint Sancho has juggled his own
“power”, which he here counterposes to freedom, out of this same
freedom and into himself, we do not intend to refer him to the
materialists or communists, but merely to the Dictionnaire de
Vacademie, where he will find that the word liberte is most frequently
used in the sense of puissance. If, however, Saint Sancho should
maintain that he does not combat “liberte” , but “ freedom ”, then he
ought to consult Hegel on negative and positive freedom.3 As a
German petty bourgeois, he might enjoy the concluding remark in
this chapter.

The antithesis can also be expressed as follows:

Freedom, idealistic striving for \ Peculiarity, actual riddance
riddance and the struggle! — and pleasure in one’s own
against other-being J existence.

Having thus, by means of a cheap abstraction, distinguished
peculiarity from freedom, Sancho pretends that he is only now
beginning to analyse this difference and exclaims:

“What a difference there is between freedom and peculiarity!” (p. 207).

We shall see that, apart from the general antitheses, he has
achieved nothing, and that peculiarity “in the ordinary sense”
continues most amusingly to creep in side by side with this definition
of peculiarity.

“In spite of the state of slavery, one can be inwardly free, although, again, only
from various things, but not from everything; but the slave cannot be free from the whip,
from the despotic mood, etc., of his master.”

“On the other hand, peculiarity is my whole essence and existence, it is I myself. I
am free from that which I have got rid of; I am the owner of that which I have in my
power or which I have mastered. I am my own at all times and under all circumstances,
if only I know how to possess myself and do not abandon myself to others. I cannot
truly want the state of being free, because I cannot ... achieve it; I can only wish for it
and strive towards it, for it remains an ideal, a spectre. At every moment the fetters of
actuality cut very deeply into my flesh. But I remain my own. Belonging as a feudal serf

a G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Einleitung. — Ed.

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to some master, I think only of myself and of my own advantage; his blows, it is true,
strike me: I am not free from them; but I endure them only for my own good, for
example, in order to deceive him by an appearance of patience and to lull him into
security or perhaps in order not to incur something worse by my defiance. But since I
constantly have in mind myself and my own advantage” (while the blows retain
possession of him and his back) “I seize on the first convenient opportunity” (i.e., he
“wishes”, he “strives” towards the first convenient opportunity, which, however,
“remains an ideal, a spectre”) “to crush the slave-owner. That I then become free from
him and his whip is only a consequence of my previous egoism. It will, perhaps, be said
here that even in the state of slavery I was free, namely ‘in myself’ or ‘inwardly’;
however, ‘free in oneself’ is not ‘actually free’, and ‘inwardly’ is not ‘outwardly’. On the
other hand, I was myself, my own wholly and completely, both inwardly and outwardly.
Under the domination of a cruel master, my body is not ‘free’ from the pain of torture
and the lashes of the whip; but it is my bones that crack under torture, my muscles that
twitch under the blows, and it is I who groan because my body suffers. The fact that I sigh and
tremble proves that I still belong to myself, that I am my own ” (pp. 207, 208).

Our Sancho, who here again acts the story-teller for the petty
bourgeois and villagers, proves here that, despite the numerous
drubbings he has already received in Cervantes, he has always
remained “owner” of himself and that these blows belonged rather
to his “peculiarity”. He is “his own” “at all times and under all
circumstances” provided he knows how to possess himself. Here,
therefore, peculiarity is hypothetical and depends on his knowledge,
by which term he understands a slavish casuistry. This knowledge
later on becomes thinking as well, when he begins “to think” about
himself and his “advantage” — this thinking and this imagined
“advantage” being his imagined “property”. It is further inter-
preted in the sense that he endures the blows “for his own good”,
where peculiarity once again consists in the idea of “good”, and
where he “endures” the bad in order not to become the “owner” of
“something worse”. Subsequently, knowledge is revealed also as the
“owner” of the reservation about “the first convenient opportunity”,
hence of a mere reservatio mentalis, and, finally, as the “crushing” of
the “slave-owner”, in the anticipation of the idea, in which case he is
the “owner” of this anticipation, whereas at present the slave-owner
actually tramples him underfoot. While, therefore, he identifies
himself here with his consciousness, which endeavours to calm itself by
means of all kinds of maxims of worldly wisdom, in the end he
identifies himself with his body, so that he is wholly “his own”,
outwardly as well as inwardly, so long as he still retains a spark of life,
even if it is merely unconscious life. Such phenomena as the cracking
of his “bones”, the twitching of his muscles, etc., are phenomena
which, when translated from the language of unique natural science
into the language of pathology, can be produced with the aid of
galvanism on his corpse, when freshly cut down from the gallows on

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

which he hanged himself, as we saw above, and which can be
produced even in a dead frog — these phenomena serve him here as
proof that he is “wholly and completely” “both inwardly and
outwardly” still “his own”, that he still has control over himself. The
very fact which demonstrates the power and peculiarity of the
slave-owner, namely that it is precisely he who is flogged and not
someone else, that it is precisely his bones that “crack”, his muscles
that twitch, without his being able to alter it — this very fact here
serves our saint as proof of his own peculiarity and power. Thus,
when he lies trussed up in the spanso bocko 89 torture of Surinam,
unable to move hand or foot, or any other of his limbs, and has to put
up with everything done to him, in such circumstances his power and
peculiarity do not consist in his being able to make use of his limbs,
but in the fact that they are his limbs. Here once again he has saved
his peculiarity by always considering himself as otherwise-
determined — sometimes as mere consciousness, sometimes as an
unconscious body (see the “Phenomenology”3).

At any rate, Saint Sancho “endures” his portion of blows with
more dignity than actual slaves do. However often, in the interests of
the slave-owners, missionaries may tell the slaves that they have to
“endure” the blows “for their own good”, the slaves are not taken in
by such twaddle. They do not coldly and timidly reflect that they
would otherwise “incur something worse”, nor do they imagine that
they “deceive the slave-owner by an appearance of patience”. On the
contrary, they scoff at their torturers, they jeer at the latter’s
impotence even to force them to humble themselves, and they
suppress every “groan” and every sigh, as long as the physical pain
permits them to do so. (See Charles Comte, Traite de legislation.)
They are therefore, neither “inwardly” nor “outwardly” their own
“owners”, but only the “owners” of their defiance, which could
equally well be expressed by saying that they are neither “inwardly”
nor “outwardly” “free”, but are free only in one respect, namely that
they are “inwardly” free from self-humiliation as they also show
“outwardly”. Insofar as “Stirner” suffers blows, he is the owner of
the blows and thus free from being not beaten; and this freedom,
this riddance, belongs to his peculiarity.

From the fact that Saint Sancho assumes that the reservation about
running away at “the first convenient opportunity” is a special
characteristic of peculiarity and sees in the “liberation” thus
obtained “merely the consequence of his previous egoism” (of his
own egoism, i.e., egoism in agreement with itself), it follows that he

This volume, p. 273. — Ed .

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309

imagines that the insurgent Negroes of Haiti90 and the fugitive
Negroes of all the colonies wanted to free not themselves, but “man”.
The slave who takes the decision to free himself must already be
superior to the idea that slavery is his “peculiarity”. He must be
“ free ” from this “peculiarity” . The “peculiarity” of an individual,
however, can consist in his “ abandoning1 ’ himself. For “one” to assert
the opposite means to apply an “alien scale” to this individual.

In conclusion, Saint Sancho takes revenge for the blows he has
received by the following address to the “owner” of his “peculiari-
ty”, the slave-owner:

“My leg is not ‘free’ from the blows of the master, but it is my leg, and it cannot be
taken away. Let him tear it from me and see whether he has possession of my leg! He
will find in his hands nothing but the corpse of my leg, which is as little my leg as a
dead dog is a dog” (p. 208).

But let him — Sancho, who imagines here that the slave-owner
wants to have his living leg, probably for his own use — let
him “see” what he still retains of his leg which “cannot be taken
away”. He retains nothing but the loss of his leg and has become the
one-legged owner of his torn-out leg. If he has to labour at a
treadmill eight hours every dav, then it is he who in the course of
time becomes an idiot, and idiocy will then be his “peculiarity”. Let
the judge who sentences him to this “see” whether he has still
Sancho’s brain “in his hands”. But that will be of little help to poor
Sancho.

“The first property, the first splendour has been won!”

After our saint, by means of these examples, which are worthy of
an ascetic, has revealed the difference between freedom and
peculiarity, at a considerable belietristical production cost, he quite
unexpectedly declares on page 209 that

“between peculiarity and freedom there lies a still deeper gulf than the simple verbal
difference”.

This “deeper gulf” consists in the fact that the above definition of
freedom is repeated with “manifold transformations” and “refrac-
tions” and numerous “episodical insertions”. From the definition of
“freedom” as “riddance” the questions arise: from what should
people be free (p. 209), etc., disputes concerning this “from what”
(ibid.) (here, too, as a German petty bourgeois, he sees in the struggle
of actual interests only wrangling about the definition of this “from
what”, in which connection, of course, it appears very strange to him
that the “citizen” does not wish to be free “from citizenship”, page
210). Then the proposition is repeated that the removal of a barrier
is the establishment of a new barrier, in the form that “the striving

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

for a definite freedom always includes the aim of a new rule”, page
210 (in which connection we learn that in the revolution the
bourgeois was not striving for his own rule but for the ‘‘rule of
law” — see above concerning liberalism3); then follows the result that
one does not wish to be rid of what “is wholly to one’s liking, e.g., the
irresistible glance of the beloved” (p. 211). Further on, it turns out
that freedom is a “phantom” (p. 211), a “dream” (p. 212); then we
learn by the way that the “voice of nature” can sometimes also
become “peculiarity” (p. 213); on the other hand the “voice of God
and conscience” is to be considered “devil’s work”, and the author
boasts: “Such godless people” (who consider it the work of the devil)
“do exist; how will you deal with them?” (pp. 213, 214). But it is not
nature that should determine me, but I who should determine my
nature, says the egoist in agreement with himself. And my conscience
is also a “voice of nature”.

In this connection it also turns out that the animal “takes very
correct steps” (p. 213). We learn further that “freedom is silent
about what should happen after I have become free” (p. 215). (See
“Solomon’s Song of Songs” .b) The exposition of the above-
mentioned “deeper gulf” is closed by Saint Sancho repeating the
scene with the blows and this time expressing himself somewhat
more clearly about peculiarity:

“Even when unfree, even bound by a thousand fetters, I nevertheless exist, and I
exist not only just in the future, and in the hope, like freedom, but even as the most
abject of slaves I am present” (p. 215).

Here, therefore, he counterposes himself and “ freedom ” as two
persons, and peculiarity becomes mere existence, being present, and
indeed the “most abject” presence. Peculiarity here is the simple
registering of personal identity. Stirner, who in an earlier passage
has already constituted himself the “secret police state”, here sets
himself up as the passport department. “By no means” should
“anything be lost” from “the world of human beings!” (See
“Solomon’s Song of Songs”.)

According to page 218, one can also “give up” one’s peculiarity
through “submissiveness”, “submission”, although, according to the
preceding, peculiarity cannot cease so long as one is present at all,
even in the most “abject” or “submissive” form. And is not the
“most abject” slave the “most submissive”? According to one of the
earlier descriptions of peculiarity, one can only “give up” one’s
peculiarity by giving up one’s life.

a This volume, pp. 221-22. — Ed.
b This volume, p. 435. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

311

On page 218, peculiarity as one aspect of freedom, as power, is
once again set against freedom as riddance; and among the means by
which Sancho pretends to protect his peculiarity, are mentioned
“hypocrisy”, “deception” (means which my peculiarity employs,
because it had to ‘ submit” to the conditions of the world), etc.,

“for the means that I employ are determined by what I am”.

We have already seen that among these means the absence of any
means plays a major role, as was evident also from his proceedings
against the moon (see above “Logic”2). Then, for a change, freedom
is regarded as “ self-liberation ”, “i.e., that I can only have as much
freedom as I procure by my peculiarity”, where the definition of
freedom as self-determination, which occurs among all, and particular-
ly German, ideologists, makes its appearance as peculiarity. This is
then explained to us on the example of “sheep”; to whom it is of no
“use” at all “if they are given freedom of speech” (p. 220). How-
trivial is his conception here of peculiarity as self-liberation is evident
if only from his repetition of the most hackneyed phrases about
granted freedom, setting free, self-liberation, etc. (pp. 220, 221).
The antithesis between freedom as riddance and peculiarity as the
negation of this riddance is now also portrayed poetically:

“Freedom arouses your wrath against everything that you are not”
(it is, therefore, wrathful peculiarity, or have choleric natures, e.g.,
Guizot, in Saint Sancho’s opinion, no “peculiarity”? And do I not
enjoy myself in wrath against others?), “egoism calls on you to rejoice
over yourself, to delight in yourself” (hence egoism is freedom which
rejoices; incidentally, we have already become acquainted with the
joy and self-enjoyment of the egoist in agreement with himself).
“Freedom is and remains a longing” (as though longing were not
also a peculiarity, the self-enjoyment of individuals of a particular
nature, especially of Christian-German individuals — and should this
longing “be lost”?). “Peculiarity is a reality which of itself abolishes all
the non-freedom which is an impediment and blocks your own path”
(in which case, then, until non-freedom is abolished my peculiarity is
a blocked peculiarity. It is characteristic again of the German petty
bourgeois that for him all barriers and obstacles disappear “of
themselves”, since he never lifts a finger to achieve it, and by habit he
turns those barriers which do not disappear “of themselves” into his
peculiarity. It mav be remarked in passing that peculiarity appears
here as an acting person, although it is later demoted to a mere
description of its owner) (p. 215).

a This volume, p. 299. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

The same antithesis appears again in the following form:

“As being your own, you are in actuality rid of everything, and what remains with you,
you have yourself accepted, it is your choice and option. One who is his own is born
free, one who is free on the other hand is only one who desires freedom.”

Nevertheless Saint Sancho “admits” on page 252

“that each is bom as a human being; hence in this respect the newborn children are
equal”.

What you as being your own have not “rid yourself of” is “your
choice and option”, as in the case of the beatings of the slave
mentioned above. — Banal paraphrase! — Here, therefore, peculiarity
is reduced to the fantastic idea that Saint Sancho has voluntarily
accepted and retained everything from which he has not “rid”
himself, e.g., hunger when he has no money. Apart from the
many things, e.g., dialect, scrofula, haemorrhoids, poverty, one-
leggedness, forced philosophising imposed on him by division of
labour, etc., etc. — apart from the fact that it in no way depends on
him whether he “accepts” these things or not; all the same, even if
for an instant we accept his premises, he has only the choice
between definite things which lie within his province and which are
in no way posited by his peculiarity. As an Irish peasant, for example,
he can only choose to eat potatoes or starve, and he is not always free
to make even this choice. In the sentence quoted above one should
note also the beautiful apposition, by which, just as in jurispru-
dence, “acceptance” is directly identified with “choice” and
“option”. Incidentally, it is impossible to say what Saint Sancho
means by one who is “born free”, whether in the context or outside
it.

And is not a feeling instilled into him, his feeling accepted by him?
And do we not learn on pages 84, 85, that “instilled” feelings are not
“one’s own” feelings? For the rest, it turns out here, as we have
already seen in connection with Klopstock3 (who is put forward here
as an example), that “one’s own” behaviour by no means coincides
with individual behaviour, although for Klopstock Christianity
seems to have been “quite right” and in no way to have
“obstructively blocked his path”.

“One who is his own does not need to free himself, because from the outset he rejects
everything except himself.... Although he remains in the confines of childish
reverence, he already viorks to ‘free’ himself from this enthralment.”

Since one who is his own does not need to free himself, already as a
child he works' to free himself, and all this because, as we have seen,

See this volume, p. 285. — Ed.

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313

he is one who is “feorn free”. “Although he remains in the confines of
childish reverence” he already reflects without any restraint, namely
in his own fashion, about this his own enthralment. But this should
not surprise us: we already saw at the beginning of the Old
Testament what a prodigy the egoist in agreement with himself was.

“ Peculiarity works in the little egoist and secures him the desired ‘freedom’.”

It is not “Stirner” who lives, it is “peculiarity” that lives, “works”
and “secures” in him. Here we learn that peculiarity is not a
description of one who is his own, but that one who is his own is
merely a paraphrase of peculiarity.

As we have seen, “riddance” at its climax was riddance from one’s
own self, self-denial. We saw also that on the other hand he put
forward “peculiarity” as the assertion of self, as self-interestedness.
But we have seen likewise that this self-interestedness itself was again
self-denial.

For some time past we have been painfully aware that “the holy”
was missing. But we rediscover it suddenly, on page 224, at the end
of the section on peculiarity, where it stands quite bashfully and
proves its identity by means of the following new turn of expression:

“My relation to something which I selfishly carry on” (or do not carry on at all) “is
different from my relation to something which I unselfishly serve” (or which I carry
on).

But Saint Max is not satisfied with this remarkable piece of
tautology, which he “accepted” from “choice and option”; there
suddenly reappears the long forgotten “one”, in the shape of
the night watchman who establishes the identity of the holy, and
declares that he

“could put forward the following distinguishing mark: against the former I can sin or
commit a sin” (a remarkable tautology!), “the other I can only lose by my folly, push
away from myself, deprive myself of it, i.e., do something stupid” (it follows that he
can lose himself by his folly, can deprive himself of himself, can be deprived of
himself — can be deprived of life). “Both these points of view are applicable to freedom
of trade, because it” is partly taken for the holy and partly not so taken, or, as Sancho
himself expresses it more circumstantially, “because it is partly regarded as a freedom
which can be granted or withdrawn depending on circumstances, and partly as a freedom
which should be regarded as holy under all circumstances” (pp. 224, 225).

Here again Sancho reveals his “peculiar” “penetration” into the
question of freedom of trade and protective tariffs. He is herewith
given the “vocation” of pointing out just one single case where
freedom of trade was regarded as “holy” 1) because it is a “ freedom ”,
and 2) “ under all circumstances” . The holy comes in useful for all
purposes.

After peculiarity, by means of logical antitheses and the
phenomenological “being-also-otherwise-determined”, has been

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

constructed, as we have seen, from a “freedom” previously trimmed
up for the purpose — Saint Sancho meanwhile having “dismissed”
everything that happened to suit him (e.g., beatings) into peculiarity,
and whatever did not suit him into freedom — we learn finally that all
this was still not true peculiarity.

“Peculiarity,” it is stated on page 225, “is not at all an idea, such as freedom, etc., it
is only a description — of the owner.”

We shall see that this “description of the owner” consists in
negating freedom in the three refractions which Saint Sancho
ascribes to it — liberalism, communism and humanism — compre-
hending it in its truth and then calling this process of
thought, which is extremely simple according to advanced logic,
the description of a real ego.

The entire chapter about peculiarity boils down to the most trivial
self-embfellishments by means of which the German petty bourgeois
consoles himself for his own impotence. Exactly like Sancho, he
thinks that in the struggle of bourgeois interests against the
remnants of feudalism and absolute monarchy in other countries
everything turns merely on a question of principles, on the question
of from what “Man” should free himself. (See also above on political
liberalism.3) Therefore in freedom of trade he sees only a freedom
and, exactly like Sancho, expatiates with a great air of importance
about whether “Man” ought to enjoy freedom of trade “under all
circumstances” or not. And when, as is inevitable in such conditions,
his aspirations for freedom suffer a miserable collapse, then, again
like Sancho, he consoles himself that “Man”, or he himseif, cannot
“become free from everything”, that freedom is a highly indefinite
concept, and that even Metternich and Charles X were able to appeal
to “true freedom” (p. 210 of “the book”; and it need only be
remarked here that it is precisely the reactionaries, especially
the Historical School and the Romanticists91 who — again just
like Sancho — reduce true freedom to peculiarity, for instance, to the
peculiarity of the Tyrolean peasants, and in general, to the peculiar
development of individuals, and also of localities, provinces and
estates). — The petty bourgeois also consoles himself that as a
German, even if he is not free, he finds compensation for all

This volume, pp. 200-01. — Ed.

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315

sufferings in his own indisputable peculiarity. Again like Sancho, he
does not see in freedom a power that he is able to obtain and
therefore declares his own impotence to be power.

What the ordinary German petty bourgeois whispers to himself as
a consolation, in the quiet depths of his mind, the Berliner trumpets
out loudly as an ingenious turn of thought. He is proud of his trashy
peculiarity and his peculiar trashiness.

5. The Owner

For the way in which the “owner” is divided into three
“refractions”: “my power”, “my intercourse” and “my self-enjoy-
ment”, see “The Economy of the New Testament”. We shall pass
directly to the first of these refractions.

A. My Power

The chapter on power has in its turn a trichotomous structure in
that it treats of: 1) right, 2) law, and 3) crime. In order to conceal
this trichotomy, Sancho resorts very frequently to the “episode”. We
give here the entire content in tabular form, with the necessary
episodical insertions.

I. Right

A. Canonisation in General

Another example of the holy is right.

Right is not ego

= not my right
= alien right
= existing right.

All existing right = alien right

= right of others
(not my right)

= right given by others
= (right, which one gives me,
which is meted out to me)
(pp. 244, 245).

I The holy

Note No. 1 . The reader will wonder why the conclusion of equation
No. 4 suddenly appears in equation No. 5 as the antecedent of the
conclusion of equation No. 3, so that in the place of “right”, “all
existing right” suddenly appears as the antecedent. This is done to
create the illusion that Saint Sancho is speaking of actual, existing

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right which, however, he by no means intends to do. He speaks of
right only insofar as it is represented to be a holy “predicate”.

Note No. 2. After right has been determined as “alien right”, it can
be given any names you like, such as “Sultan’s right”, “people’s
right”, etc., depending on how Saint Sancho wishes to define the
alien from whom he receives the right in question. This allows
Sancho to go on to say that “alien right is given by nature, God,
popular choice, etc.” (p. 250), hence “not by me”. What is naive is
only the method by which our saint through the use of synonymy
tries to give some semblance of development to the above simple
equations.

“If some blockhead considers me right” (what if he himself is the blockhead who
considers him rightPb “I begin to be mistrustful of my right” (it would be desirable in
“Stirner’s” interests that this were so). “But even if a wise man considers me right, this
still does not mean that I am right. Whether I am right is quite independent of my
being acknowledged right by fools or wise men. Nevertheless, up to now we have
striven for this right. We seek right and to this end we appeal to the court.... But what do
I seek from this court? I seek Sultan’s right, not my right, I seek alien right ... before
the high court of censorship I seek, therefore, the right of censorship” (pp. 244, 245).

One has to admire the cunning use of synonymy in this masterly
proposition. Recognition of right in the ordinary conversational
sense is identified with recognition of right in the juridical sense.
Even more worthy of admiration is the faith capable of moving
mountains in the idea that one “appeals to the court” for the sake of
the pleasure of vindicating one’s right — a faith which explains that
courts are due to litigiousness.*

Notable, finally, is also the craftiness with which Sancho — as in the
case of equation No. 5 above — smuggles in, in advance, the more

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] What idea Saint
Jacques le bonhomme really has of a court can even be deduced from the fact that as
an illustration he mentions the high court of censorship, which at best can only be
regarded as a court according to Prussian notions; a court which can merely introduce
administrative measures, but is unable either to inflict penalties or to settle civil suits.
What does it matter to a saint who is always concerned with real individuals, that two
completely different systems of production form the basis of the individuals where
court and administration are separate, and where they are combined in a patriarchal
way.

The above equations are now transformed into the moral injunctions “vocation”,
“designation”, and “task”, which Saint Max shouts in a thunderous voice to his
faithful servant Szeliga, who has an uneasy conscience. Like a Prussian non-
commissioned officer (his own “gendarme” speaks through his mouth) Saint Max
addresses Szeliga in the third person: he should see to it that his right to eat remains
uncurtailed, etc. The right of the proletarians to eat has never been “curtailed”,
nevertheless it happens “of itself” that they are very often unable to “exercise” it.

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concrete name, in this case “Sultan’s right”, in order to be able more
confidently later to bring in his universal category of “alien right”.

Alien right = not my right.

My being right according to alien

right = not to be right
= to have no right
= to be rightless (p. 247).

My right = not your right
= your wrong.

Your right = my wrong.

Note. “You desire to be in the right against others” (it should read: to be in your
right). “You cannot be this, in relation to them you will always remain in the ‘wrong’,
for they would not be your opponents if they were not also in ‘their’ right. They will
always ‘consider’ you ‘wrong’.... If you remain on the basis of right, then you remain
on the basis of litigiousness” (pp. 248, 253).

“Let us in the meantime consider the subject from yet another
aspect.” Having thus given adequate evidence of his knowledge of
right, Saint Sancho can now restrict himself to defining right once
again as the holy, in this connection repeating some of the epithets
previously given to the holy with the addition of the word “right”.

“Is not right a religious concept, i.e., something holy ?” (p. 247).

“Who can ask about ‘right’ if he does not have a religious standpoint?” (ibid.).

“Right ‘in and for itself'. Therefore without relation to me? ‘Absolute right’l There-
fore separated from me. — Something ‘being in and for itself \ — An Absolute ! An eternal
right, like an eternal truth” — the holy (p. 270).

“You recoil in horror before others because you imagine you see by their side the
spectre of rightV’ (p. 253).

“You creep about in order to win the apparition over to your side” (ibid.).

“Right is a whimsy, dispensed by an apparition” (the synthesis of the two
propositions given above) (p. 276).

“Right is ... a fixed idea” (p. 270).

“Right is spirit ...” (p. 244).

“Because right can be dispensed only by a spirit ” (p. 275).

Saint Sancho now expounds again what he already expounded in
the Old Testament, viz., what a “fixed idea” is, with the only
difference that here “right” crops up everywhere as “another
example” of the “fixed idea”.

“Right is originally my thought, or it”a (!) “has its origin in me. But if ita has
escaped from me” (in common parlance, absconded), “if the ‘word’ has been uttered,
then it has become flesh”b (and Saint Sancho can eat his fill of it), “a fixed idea” — for

a The German
thought”. — Ed.

pronoun er, used in Stirner’s book, refers to “my

Cf. John 1:14.— Ed.

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which reason Stirner’s whole book consists of “fixed ideas”, which have “escaped”
from him, but have been caught by us and confined in the much-praised “house for
the correction of morals”. “Now I can no longer get rid of the idea” (after the idea has
got rid of him !); “however I twist and turn, it confronts me.” (The pigtail, which hangs
down behind him.3) “Thus, people have been unable to regain control of the idea of
‘right’ that they themselves have created. Their creature runs away with them. That is
absolute right, which is absolved” (o synonymy!) “and detached from me. Since we worship
it as Absolute, we cannot devour it again and it deprives us of our creative power; the
creation is more than the creator, it exists in and for itself. Do not allow right to run
about freely any longer....” (We shall already in this sentence follow this advice and
chain it up for the time being) (p. 270).

Having thus dragged right through all possible ordeals of sanctifi-
cation by fire and water and canonised it, Saint Sancho has thereby
destroyed it.

“With absolute right, right itself disappears, at the same time the domination of the
concept of right” (hierarchy) “is wiped out. For one should not forget that concepts,
ideas, and principles have up to now ruled over us and that among these rulers the
concept of right or the concept of justice has played one of the most important parts”

(p. 276).

That relations of right here once again appear as the domination
of the concept of right and that Stirner kills right simply by declaring
it a concept, and therefore the holy, is something to which we are
already accustomed; on this see “Hierarchy'’.0 Right [according to
Stirner] does not arise from the material relations of people and the
resulting antagonism of people against one another, but from their
struggle against their own concept, which they should “get out of
their heads ’. See ‘Logic’’.0

This last form of the canonisation of right comprises also the fol-
lowing three notes:

Note i.

“So long as this alien right coincides with mine, I shall, of course, find the latter
also in it” (p. 245).

Saint Sancho might ponder awhile over this proposition.

Note 2.

“f f once an egoistic interest crept in, then society was corrupted ... as is shown, for
example, by the Roman society with its highly developed civil law” (p. 278).

According to this, Roman society from the very outset must have
been corrupted Roman society, since egoistic interest is manifested in
the Ten Tables92 even more sharply than in the “highly developed
civil law’’ of the imperial epoch. In this unfortunate reminiscence

3 The words are from Chamisso’s poem “Tragische Geschichte”. — Ed.

This volume, pp. 180, 183. — Ed.

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from Hegel, therefore, civil law is considered a symptom of egoism,
and not of the holy. Here, too, Saint Sancho might well reflect on the
extent to which civil law [Privat recht] is linked with private property
[Vr'wateigentum] and to what extent civil law implies a multitude of
other legal relations (cf. “Private Property, State and Right”3) about
which Saint Max has nothing to say except that they are the holy.

Note 3.

“ Although right is derived from the concept, nevertheless it only comes into existence
because it serves men’s needs.”

So says Hegel ( Rechtsphilosophie,b par 209, Addition) from whom
our saint derived the hierarchy of concepts in the modern world.
Hegel, therefore, explains the existence of right from the empirical
needs of individuals, and rescues the concept only by means of a
simple assertion. One can see how infinitely more materialistically
Hegel proceeds than our “corporeal ego”, Saint Sancho.

B. Appropriation by Simple Antithesis

a) The right of man

b) Human right

c) Alien right = to be
authorised by others

d) Right is that which man \ ( Right is that which I con-

considers right / \sider right.

“This is egoistic right, i.e., I consider it right, therefore, it is right” ( passin ; the last
sentence is on p. 251).

Note 1.

“I am authorised by myself to commit murder if I do not forbid myself to do so, if
I myself am not afraid of murder as a wrong” (p. 249).

This should read: I commit murder if I do not forbid myself to do
so, if I am not afraid of murder. This whole proposition is a boastful
expansion of the second equation in antithesis c, where the word
“authorised” has lost its meaning.

Note 2.

“I decide whether it is right within me\ outside me, no right exists” (p. 249). — “Are
we what is in us? No, no more than we are what is outside us.... Precisely because we
are not the spirit which dwells in us, for that very reason we had to transfer it outside us
... think of it as existing outside us ... in the beyond ” (p. 43).

Thus, according to his own statement on page 43, Saint Sancho has

3 This volume, p. 354. — Ed.

b G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts. — Ed.

— My right.

— Egoistic right.

I j My right = to be authorised

J 1 by myself.

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again to transfer the right “in him’’ to “outside himself”, and indeed
“into the beyond”. But if at some stage he wants to appropriate
things for himself in this fashion, then he can transfer “into himself”
morality, religion, everything “holy”, and decide whether “in him”
it is the moral, the religious, the holy — “outside him there exists
no” morality, religion, holiness — in order thereupon to transfer
them, according to page 43, again outside himself, into the beyond.
Thereby the “restoration of all things”3 according to the Christian
model is brought about.

Note 3.

“Outside me no right exists. If I consider it right then it is right. It is possible that it
is still not on that account right for others” (p. 249).

This should read: If I consider it right then it is right for me, but
it is still not right for others. We have by now had sufficient examples
of the sort of synonymical “flea-jumps” Saint Sancho makes with the
word “right”. The right and right, legal “right”, moral “right”, what
he considers “right”, etc. — all are used higgledy-piggledy, as it suits
him. Let Saint Max attempt to translate his propositions about right
into another language; his nonsense would then become fully
apparent. Since this synonymy was dealt with exhaustively in “The
Logic [of the New Wisdom]”, we need here only refer to that
section.6

The proposition mentioned above is also presented in the
following three “transformations”:

A. “Whether I am right or not, of that there can be no other judge than I myself.
Others can judge and decide only whether they agree with my right and whether it
exists as right also for them” (p. 246).

B. “It is true that society wants each person to attain his right, but only right
sanctioned by society, social right, and not actually his right” (it should read: “what is
his ” — “right” is a quite meaningless word here. And then he continues boastfully:) “I,
however, give myself, or take for myself, right on my own authority.... Owner and
creator of my right” (“creator” only insofar as he first declares right to be his thought
and then asserts that he has taken this thought back into himself), “I recognise no
other source of right but myself — neither God, nor the state, nor nature, nor man,
neither divine nor human right” (p. 269).

C. “Since human right is always something given, in reality it always amounts to the
right which people give to, i.e., concede, one another” (p. 251).

Egoistical right, on the other hand, is the right which I give myself
or take.

However, “let us say in conclusion, it can be seen” that in Sancho’s
millennium egoistical right, about which people “ came to terms ” with

a Mark 9: 12.— Ed.
b This volume, pp. 275-77. — Ed.

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321

each other, is not so very different from that which people “ give to ”
or “ concede ” one another.

Note 4.

“In conclusion, I have now still to take back the half-and-half mode of expression
which I desired to use only while I was delving into the bowels of right and allowed at
least the word to remain. In point of fact, however, together with the concept the word
loses its meaning. What I called my right, is no longer right at all” (p. 275).

Everyone will see at a glance why Saint Sancho allowed the “word”
right to remain in the above antitheses. For as he dees not speak at all
about the content of right, let alone criticise it, he can only by
retaining the word right make it appear that he is speaking about
right. If the word right is left out of the antithesis, all that it contains is
“I”, “my” and the other grammatical forms of the first person
pronoun. The content was always introduced only by means of
examples which, however, as we have seen, were nothing but
tautologies, such as: if I commit murder, then I commit murder, etc.,
and in which the words “right”, “authorised”, etc., were introduced
only to conceal the simple tautology and give it some sort of
connection with the antitheses. The synonymy, too, was intended to
create the appearance of dealing with some sort of content.
Incidentally, one can see at once what a rich source of bragging this
empty chatter about right provides.

Thus, all the “delving into the bowels of right” amounted to this,
that Saint Sancho “made use of a half-and-half mode of expression”
and “allowed at least the word to remain”, because he was unable to
say anything about the subject itself. If the antithesis is to have any
meaning, that is to say, if “Stirner” simply wanted to demonstrate in
it his repugnance to right, then one must say rather that it was not he
who “delved into the bowels of right”, but that right “delved” into
his bowels and that he merely recorded the fact that right is not to his
liking. “Keep this right uncurtailed”, Jacques le bonhomme!

To introduce some sort of content into this void, Saint Sancho has
to undertake yet another logical manoeuvre, which with great
“virtuosity” he thoroughly shuffles together with canonisation and
the simple antithesis, and so completely masks with numerous
episodes that the German public and German philosophers, at any
rate, were unable to see through it.

C. Appropriation by Compound Antithesis

“Stirner” now has to introduce an empirical definition of right,
which he can ascribe to the individual, i.e., he has to recognise
something else in right besides holiness. In this connection, he could

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have spared himself all his clumsy machinations, since, starting with
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bodinus and others of modern times,
not to mention earlier ones, might has been represented as the basis
of right. Thereby the theoretical view of politics was freed from
morality, and apart from the postulate of an independent treatment
of politics nothing was accepted. Later, in the eighteenth century in
France and in the nineteenth century in England, all right was
reduced to civil law (which Saint Max does not discuss) and the
latter to a quite definite power, the power of the owners of private
property. Moreover, the matter was by no means left at a mere
phrase.

Thus Saint Sancho draws the definition of might from right and
explains it as follows:

“We are in the habit of classifying states according to the various ways in which the
‘supreme power’ is divided ... hence, the supreme power! Power over whom? Over the
individual.... The state uses force ... the behaviour of the state is exercise of force, and it
calls its force right.... The collective as a whole ... has a power which is called rightful,
i.e., which is right” (pp. 259, 260).

Through “our” “habit”, our saint arrives at his longed-for power
and can now “look after”3 himself.

Right, the might of man — might, my right.

Intermediate equations:

To be authorised = to be empowered.

To authorise oneself = to empower oneself.

Antithesis:

To be authorised by man — to be empowered by me.
First antithesis:

Right, might of man — Might, my right
now becomes converted into:

Right of man —

f Might of me,
) My might,

because in the thesis right and might are identical, and in the
antithesis the “half-and-half mode of expression” has to be “taken
back”, since right, as we have seen, has “lost all meaning”.

Note 1. Examples of bombastic and boastful paraphrases of the
above antitheses and equations:

“What you have the power to be, you have the right to be.” “I derive all right and
all authority from myself, I am authorised to do everything which I have the power to

a In the German original a pun on the word pflegen , which can mean to be in the
habit, to be accustomed to and to look after, to take care of. — Ed.

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323

do.” — “I do not demand any right, and therefore I need recognise none. What I can
obtain for myself by force, I obtain for myself, and what I cannot obtain by force, to
that I have no right either, etc. — It is a matter of indifference to me whether I am
authorised or not; if only I have the potuer, then I am already empowered as a matter of
course and do not need any other power or authority” (pp. 248, 275).

Note 2. Examples of the way in which Saint Sancho expounds
might as the real basis of right:

“Thus, ‘the communists’ say” (how on earth does “Stirner” know what the
communists say, since he has never set eyes on anything concerning them except the
Bluntschli report/1 Becker’s Volksphilosophie and a few other things?): “Equal work
gives people the right to equal enjoyment.... No, equal work does not give you this
right, only equal enjoyment gives you the right to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, and you
are entitled to enjoyment.... If you take enjoyment, then it is your right; if, on the
other hand, you only yearn for it, without seizing it, it will remain as before the
‘established right’ of those who have the privilege of enjoyment. It is their right, just as
it would become your right, by your seizing it” (p. 250).

Compare what is here put into the mouth of the communists
with what was previously said about “communism”. Saint Sancho
again presents the proletarians here as a “closed society”, which has
only to take the decision of “seizing” in order the next day to put a
summary end to the entire hitherto existing world order. But in
reality the proletarians arrive at this unity only through a long
process of development in which the appeal to their right also plays a
part. Incidentally, this appeal to their right is only a means of making
them take shape as “they”, as a revolutionary, united mass.

As for the above proposition itself, from start to finish it is a
brilliant example of tautology, as is at once clear if one omits both
might and right, which can be done without any harm to the content.
Secondly, Saint Sancho himself distinguishes between personal and
material property,'5 thereby making a distinction between enjoying
and the power to enjoy. I may have great personal power (capacity) of
enjoyment without necessarily having the corresponding material
power (money, etc.). Thus my actual “enjoyment” still remains
hypothetical.

“That the child of royalty sets himself above other children,” continues our
school-master, using examples suitable for a child’s book, “is already his act, one which
ensures his superiority, and that other children recognise and approve this act is their
act, which makes them deserving of being subjects” (p. 250).

In this example, the social relation in which the royal child
stands to other children is regarded as the power and indeed as the

a Johann Caspar Bluntschli, “Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz nach den bei
Weitling vorgefundenen Papieren — Ed.

b In the original Vermogen, which can mean both ability, faculty, power and means,
fortune, property. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

personal power of the royal child, and as the impotence of other
children. If the fact that other children allow themselves to be
commanded by the royal child is regarded as the “act” of the other
children, this proves at most that they are egoists. “Peculiarity is at
work in the little egoists” and induces them to exploit the royal child,
to extract an advantage from him.

“It is said” (i.e., Hegel said) “that punishment is the right of the criminal.3 But
impunity is equally his right. If he succeeds in his undertakings, he gets his right, and
if he fails it equally serves him right. If someone with reckless courage puts himself in
danger and is killed, we say: it serves him right, he asked for it. But if he overcomes
the danger, i.e., if his power is victorious, it appears he is also right. If a child plays with
a knife and cuts himself, it serves him right; if he does not cut himself, that is also all
right. Therefore it serves the criminal right if he suffers the penalty he risked; why did
he take the risk, knowing the possible consequences?” (p. 255).

In the concluding words of the last sentence, where the criminal
is asked why he took the risk, the school-masterish nonsense of the
whole passage is latent. Whether it serves a criminal right if on
burgling a house he falls down and breaks his leg, or a child who cuts
himself — all these important questions, with which only a man like
Saint Sancho is capable of occupying himself, yield only the result
that here chance is declared to be my power. Thus, in the first
example it was my action that was “my power”, in the second
example it was social relations independent of me, in the third it was
chance. But we have already encountered these contradictory
definitions in connection with peculiarity.

Between the above childish examples Sancho inserts the following
amusing little intermezzo:

“For otherwise right would be a humbug. The tiger who attacks me is right and I,
who kill it, am also right. I am protecting against it not my right, but myself” (p. 251).

In the first part of this passage Saint Sancho sets himself in a
relation of right to the tiger, but in the second part it occurs to him
that basically no relation of right is involved at all. For that reason
“right” appears to “be a humbug”. The right of “Man” merges into
the right of the “Tiger”.

This concludes the criticism of right. Long after having learned
from hundreds of earlier writers that right originated from force, we
now learn from Saint Sancho that “right” is “the power of man”.
Thus he has successfully eliminated all questions about the
connection between right and real people and their relations, and
has established his antithesis. He restricts himself to abolishing right

G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, I. Theil, 3. Abschnitt. — Ed.

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325

in the form in which he posits it, namely, as the holy, i.e., he restricts
himself to abolishing the holy and leaving right untouched.

This criticism of right is embellished with a host of episodes — all
sorts of things which people are “in the habit” of discussing at
Stehely’s between two and four in the afternoon.

Episode 1. “ The right of man ” and “established right”.

“When the revolution made ‘equality’ into a ‘right’, it [the revolution] fled into the
religious sphere, into the domain of the holy, the ideal. Therefore a struggle has been
waged ever since over the holy, inalienable rights of man. Quite naturally and with
equal justification, the ‘established right of the existing’ is asserted against the eternal
right of man; right against right, and of course each of these condemns the other as a
wrong. Such has been the dispute over right since the revolution” (p. 248).

Here Saint Sancho first of all repeats that the rights of man are
“the holy” and that therefore a struggle over the rights of man has
been waged ever since. Thereby he only proves that the material
basis of this struggle is still, for him, holy, i.e., alien.

Since the “right of man” and “established right” are both
“rights”, they are “equally justified” and here in fact “justified” in
the historical sense. Since both are “rights” in the legal sense, they are
“equally justified” in the historical sense. In this way one can dispose
of everything in the shortest space of time without knowing anything
about the matter. Thus, for example, it can be said of the struggle
over the Corn Laws in England; “quite naturally and with equal
justification” rent, which is also profit (gain), is “asserted” against
the profit (gain) [of the manufacturers], gain against gain, and “of
course each of these decries the other. Such has been the struggle”
over the Corn Laws in England since 1815.93

Incidentally, Stirner might have said from the outset: existing
right is the right of man, human right. In certain circles one is also
“in the habit” of calling it “established right”. Where then is the
difference between the “right of man” and “established right”?

We already know that alien, holy right is what is given to me by
others. But since the rights of man are also called natural, innate
rights, and since for Saint Sancho the name is the thing itself, it
follows that they are rights which are mine by nature, i.e., by birth.

But “established rights amount to the same thing, namely to nature, which gives
me a right, that is to birth and, furthermore, to inheritance”, and so on. “I am born as a
man is equivalent to saying: I am born as a king’s son.”

This is on pages 249, 250, where Babeuf is reproached for not
having had this dialectical talent for dissolving differences. Since
“under all circumstances”, the “ego” is “also” man, as Saint Sancho
later concedes, and therefore has the benefit “also” of what it has as
man, just as the ego, for instance, as a Berliner has the benefit of the

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Berlin Tiergarten,3 so “also” the ego has the benefit of the right of
man “under all circumstances”. But since he is by no means born a
“king’s son” “under all circumstances”, he by no means has the
benefit of “established right” “under all circumstances”. In the
sphere of right, therefore, there is an essential difference between
the “right of man” and “established right”. If it had not been nec-
essary for Saint Sancho to conceal his logic it “should have been
said here”: After I have, in my opinion, dissolved the concept of
right, in the way in which I am generally “in the habit” of dissolving
concepts, the struggle over these two special rights becomes a
struggle within a concept which, in my opinion, has been dissolved by
me, and “therefore” does not need to be touched upon any further
by me.

For greater thoroughness Saint Sancho could have added the
following new turn of expression: The right of man too is acquired,
hence well acquired, and well-acquired [i.e., established] right is the
human right possessed by men, the right of man.

That such concepts, if they are divorced from the empirical reality
underlying them, can be turned inside-out like a gloveb has already
been thoroughly enough proved by Hegel, whose use of this method,
as against the abstract ideologists, was justified. Saint Sancho,
therefore, has no need to make it appear ridiculous by his own
“clumsy” “machinations”.

So far established right and the right of man “have amounted to
the same thing ”, so that Saint Sancho could reduce to nothing a
struggle that exists outside his mind, in history. Now our saint proves
that he is as keen-witted in drawing distinctions as he is all-powerful
in heaping everything together, in order to be able to bring about a
new terrible struggle in the “creative nothing” of his head.

“I am also ready to admit” (magnanimous Sancho) “that everyone is born as a
human being” (hence, according to the above-mentioned reproach against Babeuf,
also as a “king’s son”), “hence, the newly born are in this respect equal to one another ...
only because as yet they reveal themselves and act as nothing but mere children of
men, naked little human beings.” On the other hand, adults are the “children of their
own creation”. They “possess more than merely innate rights, they have acquired
rights”.

(Does Stirner believe that the infant emerged from the mother’s
womb without any act of his own, an act by which he acquired the
“right” to be outside the mother’s womb; and does not every child
from the very beginning reveal himself and act as a “unique” child?)

a A park in Berlin. — Ed.

b Cf. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 1. — Ed.

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“What a contradiction, what a battlefield! The old battle of innate rights and
established rights!” (p. 252).

What a battle of bearded men against babes!

Incidentally, Sancho speaks against the rights of man only because
“in recent times” it has again become “customary” to speak against
them. In fact he has “acquired” these innate rights of man. In
connection with peculiarity we already met the man who is “born
free” a; there Sancho made peculiarity the innate right of man,
because merely by being born he revealed himself as being free and
acted as such. Furthermore: “Every ego is already from birth a
criminal against the state”, whereby a crime against the state
becomes an innate right of man, and the child already commits a
crime against something that does not yet exist for him, but for
which he exists. Finally, “Stirner” speaks further on about “ innately
limited intellects”, “ born poets”, “6om musicians”, etc. Since here the
power (musical, poetic resp. limited ability) is innate, and right=
power, one sees how “Stirner” claims for the “ego” the innate rights
of man, although this time equality does not figure among these rights.

Episode 2. Privileges and equal rights. Our Sancho first of all
transforms the struggle over privilege and equal right into a struggle
over the mere “concepts” privileged and equal. In this way he saves
himself the trouble of having to know anything about the medieval
mode of production, the political expression of which was privilege,
and the modern mode of production, of which right as such, equal
right, is the expression, or about the relation of these two modes of
production to the legal relations which correspond to them. Fie can
even reduce the two above-mentioned “concepts” to the still simpler
expression: equal and unequal, and prove that one and the same
thing (e.g., other people, a dog, etc.) may, according to cir-
cumstances, be a matter of indifference — i.e., of equanimity,
equality, or it may not be a matter of indifference — i.e., it may be
different, unequal, preferred, etc., etc.

“Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted.” (Saint-Jacques le
bonhomme 1 :9.)D

II. Law

Here we must disclose to the reader a great secret of our saint, viz.,
that he begins his whole treatise about right with a general
explanation of right, which “escapes” from him so long as he is

d See this volume, p. 311. — Ed.
b James 1 : 9. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

speaking about right, and which he is only able to recapture when he
begins to speak about something totally different, namely — law.
Then the gospel called out to our saint: judge not, that ye be not
judged3 — and he opened his mouth and taught, saying:

“ Right is the spirit of society. ” (But society is the holy). “ If society has a will, then this
will is indeed right: society exists only thanks to right. But since it exists only thanks to the
fact” (not thanks to right, but only thanks to the fact) “that it exercises its domination
over individuals, so right is its dominant will” (p. 244).

That is to say: ‘ Wight ... is ... has ... then ... indeed ... exists only ...
since ... exists only thanks to the fact ... that ... so ... dominant will” .
This passage is Sancho in all his perfection.

This passage “escaped” at that time from our saint because it was
not suitable for his theses, and has now been partially recaptured
because it is now partially suitable again.

“States endure so long as there is a dominant will and this dominant will is
regarded as equivalent to one’s own will. The will of the ruler is law” (p. 256).

The dominant will of society = right,

Dominant will = law —

Right = law.

“Sometimes”, i.e., as the trade mark of his “treatise” about law,
there will still turn out to be a distinction between right and law, a
distinction which — strange to say — has almost as little to do with his
“treatise” about law as the definition of right which “escaped” from
him has to do with the “treatise” about “right”:

“But what is right, what is considered legitimate in a society is also given a verbal
expression — in law” (p. 255).

This proposition is a “clumsy” copy of Hegel:

“That which is lawful is the source of the knowledge of what is right or, properly,
what is legitimate.”

What Saint Sancho calls “receiving verbal expression”, Hegel also
calls: “posited”, “known”, etc., Rechtsphilosophie, par. 211 et seq.

It is very easy to understand why Saint Sancho had to exclude right
as the “will” or the “dominant will” of society from his “treatise”
about right. Only to the extent that right was defined as man’s power
could he take it back into himself as his power. For the sake of his
antithesis, therefore, he had to hold fast to the materialistic
definition of “power” and let the idealistic definition of “will”
“escape”. Why, when speaking of “law”, he now recaptures “will”
we shall understand in connection with the antitheses about law.

a Matthew 7 : 1. — Ed.

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In actual history, those theoreticians who regarded might as the
basis of right were in direct contradiction to those who looked on
will as the basis of right — a contradiction which Saint Sancho could
have regarded also as that between realism (the child, the ancient,
the Negro, etc.) and idealism (the youth, the modern, the Mongol,
etc.). If power is taken as the basis of right, as Hobbes, etc., do, then
right, law, etc., are merely the symptom, the expression of other
relations upon which state power rests. The material life of
individuals, which by no means depends merely on their “will”, their
mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually
determine each other — this is the real basis of the state and remains
so at all the stages at which division of labour and private property
are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals.
These actual relations are in no way created by the state power; on
the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule
in these conditions — leaving aside the fact that their power must
assume the form of the state — have to give their will, which is
determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as
the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always
determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law
demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their
bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary
decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form
of law, and at the same time make it independent of the personal
arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on
their idealistic will. Their personal rule must at the same time assume
the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on
conditions of life which as they develop are common to many
individuals, and the continuance of which they, as ruling individuals,
have to maintain against others and, at the same time, to maintain
that they hold good for everybody. The expression of this will, which
is determined by their common interests, is the law. It is precisely
because individuals who are independent of one another assert
themselves and their own will, and because on this basis their
attitude to one another is bound to be egoistical, that self-denial is
made necessary in law and right, self-denial in the exceptional case,
and self-assertion of their interests irT the average case (which,
therefore, not they, but only the “egoist in agreement with himself”
regards as self-denial). The same applies to the classes which are
ruled, whose will plays just as small a part in determining the
existence of law and the state. For example, so long as the productive
forces are still insufficiently developed to make competition
superfluous, and therefore would give rise to competition over and

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over again, for so long the classes which are ruled would be wanting
the impossible if they had the “will” to abolish competition and with
it the state and the law. Incidentally, too, it is only in the imagination
of the ideologist that this “will” arises before relations have
developed far enough to make the emergence of such a will possible.
After relations have developed sufficiently to produce it, the
ideologist is able to imagine this will as being purely arbitrary and
therefore as conceivable at all times and under all circumstances.

Like right, so crime, i.e., the struggle of the isolated individual
against the predominant relations, is not the result of pure
arbitrariness. On the contrary, it depends on the same conditions as
that domination. The same visionaries who see in right and law the
domination of some independently existing general will can see in
crime the mere violation of right and law. Hence the state does not
exist owing to the dominant will, but the state, which arises from the
material mode of life of individuals, has also the form of a dominant
will. If the latter loses its domination, it means that not only the will
has changed but also the material existence and life of the
individuals, and only for that reason has their will changed. It is
possible for rights and laws to be “inherited”,3 but in that case they
are no longer dominant, but nominal, of which striking examples are
furnished by the historv of ancient Roman law and English law. We
saw earlier how a theory and history of pure thought could arise
among philosophers owing to the separation of ideas from the
individuals and their empirical relations which serve as the basis of
these ideas. In the same way, here too one can separate right from its
real basis, whereby one obtains a “dominant will” which in different
eras undergoes various modifications and has its own, independent
history in its creations, the laws. On this account, political and civil
history becomes ideologically merged in a history of the domination
of successive laws. This is the specific illusion of lawyers and
politicians, which Jacques le bonhomme adopts sans fagon. He
succumbs to the same illusion as, for example, Frederick William IV,
who also regards laws as mere caprices of the dominant will and
hence always finds that they come to grief against the “awkward
something of the world. Hardly [one] of his quite harmless whims
reaches a further stage of realisation than cabinet decrees. Let him
issue an order for a twenty-five million loan, i.e., for one hundred

a Paraphrase of a passage from Goethe’s Faust, I. Teil, 2. “Studierzimmerszene”,
where Mephistopheles says: “Laws and rights are inherited like an eternal
malady.” — Ed.

Paraphrase of a line from Goethe’s Faust, I. Teil, 1. “Studierzimmerszene”,
where Mephistopheles says: “This something, this awkward world.” — Ed.

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and tenth part of the English national debt, and he will see whose will
his dominant will is. Incidentally, we shall, find later on, too, that
Jacques le bonhomme uses the phantoms or apparitions of his
sovereign and fellow-Berliner as documents out of which to weave
his own theoretical whimsies about right, law, crime, etc. This should
occasion us the less surprise since even the spectre of the Vossische
Zeitung repeatedly “offers” him something, e.g., the constitutional
state. The most superficial examination of legislation, e. g., poor laws
in all countries, shows how far the rulers got when they imagined
that they could achieve something by means of their “dominant will”
alone, i.e., simply by exercising their will. Incidentally, Saint Sancho
has to accept the illusion of the lawyers and politicians about the
dominant will in order to let his own will be splendidly displayed in
the equations and antitheses with which we shall presently delight
ourselves, and in order to arrive at the result that he can get out of
his head any idea which he has put into it.

“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations” (Saint-lacques
le bonhomme 1 :2).a

Law = Dominant will of the state,

= state will.

Antitheses :

State will, alien will —
Dominant will of the state —

Subjects of the state, who
sustain the law of the state

Equations:

A) State will =

B) My will =

C) Will =

D) My will =

E) To desire
the non-state —

Self-will =

F) State will =

G) My lack of will =

My will, own will.

My own will
My self-will.

{“Subjects of themselves (unique
ones), who bear their own law in
themselves” (p. 268).

Not-my will.

Not-state will.

Desire.

Non-desire of the state.

Will against the state,

111 will towards the state.

Self-will.

Not to desire the state.

Negation of my will,

My lack of will.

Existence of state will.

a James 1 : 2.— Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

(We know already from the preceding that the existence of the
state will is equal to the existence of the state, from which the follow-
ing new equation results:)

H) My lack of will
I) The negation of my lack
of will

K) Self-will

L) My will

Note 1.

According to the already quoted passage from page 256:

“States endure so long as the dominant will is regarded as equivalent to one’s own
will.”

Note 2.

“He who in order to exist” (the conscience of the state is appealed to) “is
compelled to count on the lack of will of others is a creation of those others, just as the
master is a creation of the servant” (p. 257). (Equations F, G, H, I.)

Note 3.

“ My own will is the corrupter of the state. Therefore, it is branded by the latter as self-
will. One’s own will and the state are powers that are mortal enemies, between whom
eternal peace is impossible” (p. 257). — “Therefore it in fact watches everybody, it sees
an egoist in everyone” (self-will), “and it fears the egoist” (p. 263). “The state ... op-
poses the duel ... even a scuffle is punishable” (even if the police are not called in)
(p. 245).

Note 4.

“For it, for the state,it is absolutely essential that no one should have his own will,
if anyone had such a will, the state would have to expel him” (imprison, banish); “if
everyone had it” (“who is this person whom you call ‘everyone’”?) “then they would
abolish the state” (p. 257).

This can also be expressed rhetorically:

“What is the use of your laws if no one obeys them, what is the use of your
orders if everybody refuses to accept any orders?” (p. 256).*

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Note 5. “People try to
distinguish between law and the arbitrary command, or ordinance.... However, a law
relating to human action ... is a declaration of will, hence a command (ordinance)”
(p. 256).... “Someone can, of course, declare what he is prepared to put up with and
consequently forbid the opposite by a law, announcing that he will treat the transgres-
sor as an enemy.... I am forced to put up with the fact that he treats me as his enemy,
but I shall never permit him to treat me as if I were his creature and to make his rea-
son or perhaps unreasonableness my guiding principle” (p. 256). — Thus Sancho
raises no objections here against the law when it treats the transgressor as an enemy.
His hostility towards the law is directed only against the form, not against the content.
Any repressive law which threatens him with the gallows and the wheel is acceptable to
him if he can consider it as a declaration of war. Saint Sancho is satisfied if one does
him the honour of regarding him as an enemy, and not as a creature. In reality he is at
best the enemy of “Man”, but the creature of the conditions in Berlin.

= Existence of the state.

= Non-existence of the state.
= Negation of the state.

= Non-existence of the state.

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333

Note 5.

The simple antithesis: “state will — my will” is given an apparent motivation in the
following paragraph: “Even if one were to imagine a case where each individual in
the nation had expressed the same will and thus a perfect collective will ” (!) “had come
into existence, things would still remain the same. Would I not today and later be
bound by my will of yesterday?... My creation, that is, a definite expression of will,
would have become my master; but I ... the creator, would be hampered in my
course and my dissolution.... Because yesterday I possessed will, I have today no will
of my own; yesterday voluntary, today involuntary” (p. 258).

The old thesis, which has often been put forward both by
revolutionaries and reactionaries, that in a democracy individuals
only exercise their sovereignty for a moment and then at once
relinquish their authority — this thesis Saint Sancho endeavours to
appropriate here in a “clumsy” fashion by applying to it his
phenomenological theory of creator and creation. But the theory of
creator and creation deprives this thesis of all meaning. According to
this theory of his, it is not that Saint Sancho has no will of his own
today because he has changed his will of yesterday, i.e., has a
differently defined will, so that the nonsense which yesterday he
exalted into a law as the expression of his will, now weighs like a bond
or fetter on his more enlightened will of today. On the contrary,
according to his theory, his will of today must be the negation of his
will of yesterday, because, as creator, he is in duty bound to dissolve
his will of yesterday. Only as “one without will” is he creator, as one
actually having will he is always the creation. (See “Phenomenolo-
gy”.3) In that case, however, it by no means follows that “because
yesterday he possessed will”, today he is “without will”, but rather
that he bears ill will to his will of yesterday, whether the latter has
assumed the form of law or not. In both cases he can abolish it as he,
in general, is accustomed to do, namely as his will. Thereby he has
done full justice to egoism in agreement with itself. It is, therefore, a
matter of complete indifference here whether his will of yesterday
has assumed as law the form of something existing outside his head,
particularly if we recall that earlier the “word which escaped from
him” behaved likewise in a rebellious way towards him. In the
above-mentioned thesis, moreover, Saint Sancho desires to preserve,
not indeed his self-will, but his free will, freedom of will, freedom, which
is a serious offence against the moral code of the egoist in agreement
with himself. In committing this offence, Saint Sancho even goes so
far as to proclaim that true peculiarity is the inner freedom that was
so much condemned above, the freedom of bearing ill will.

See this volume, pp. 257-58. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“How is this to be changed?” cries Sancho. “Only in one way: by not recognising
any duty, i.e., not binding myself and not allowing myself to be bound [....]

“However, they will bind me! No one can bind my will, and my ill will remains
free!" (p. 258).

Drums and trumpets pay homage
To his youthful splendour!3

Here Saint Sancho forgets “to make the simple reflection” that his
“will” is indeed “bound” inasmuch as, against his will, it is “ill will”.

The above proposition that the individual will is bound by the
general will expressed through law completes, by the way, the
idealistic conception of the state, according to which it is only a
matter of the will, and which has led French and German writers to
the most subtle philosophising.*

Incidentally, if it is merely a matter of “desiring” and not of
“being able” and, at worst, merely of “ill will”, then it is
incomprehensible why Saint Sancho wants to abolish altogether an
object so productive of “desiring” and “ill will” as state law.

“Law in general, etc. — that is the stage we have reached today” (p. 256).

The things Jacques le bonhomme believes!

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Whether or not
tomorrow the self-will of an individual will feel oppressed by the law which yesterday
he helped to make, depends on whether new circumstances have arisen and whether
his interests have changed to such an extent that yesterday’s law no longer
corresponds to his changed interests. If the new circumstances affect the interests of
the ruling class as a whole, the class will alter the law; if they affect only a few
individuals the majority will, of course, disregard their ill will.

Equipped with this freedom of the ill will, Sancho can now re-establish the
restriction imposed on the will of one person bv the will of the others; it is precisely
this restriction which forms the basis of the above-mentioned idealist conception of the
state.

“Everything would be higgledy-piggledy if everyone could do what he liked. — But
who says that everyone can do everything?” (“What he likes” is here prudently
omitted.) —

“Every one of you should become an omnipotent ego!” declared the egoist in
agreement with himself.

“What do you exist for,” he continues, “you who need not put up with everything?
Defend yourself, then no one will harm you” (p. 259). And to remove the last
semblance of a difference he lets “a few million” “stand as a protection” behind the
one “you”, so that the whole discussion can very well serve as a “clumsy” beginning of
a political theory in the spirit of Rousseau.

d From Heine’s poem “Berg-Idylle”. — Ed.

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335

The equations so far examined were purely destructive as regards
state and law. The true egoist had to adopt a purely destructive
attitude to both. We missed appropriation; on the other hand, we
had the satisfaction of seeing Saint Sancho performing a great trick
in which he shows how the state is destroyed by a mere change of
will, a change which in turn depends, of course, only on the will.
However, appropriation is not lacking here either, although it is
quite secondary, and can produce results only later on “from time to
time”. The two antitheses given above:

State will, alien will — My will, own will,

Dominant will of the state — My own will
can also be summarised as follows:

Domination of alien will — Domination of one’s own will.

In this new antithesis, which incidentally all the time formed the
concealed basis of his destruction of the state through his self-will,
Stirner appropriates the political illusion about the domination of
arbitrariness, of ideological will. He could also have expressed this as
follows:

Arbitrariness of law — Law of arbitrariness.

Saint Sancho, however, did not reach such simplicity of expression.

In antithesis III we already have a “law within him”, but he
appropriates the law still more directly in the following antithesis:

Law, the state’s declaration \ I Law, declaration of my will.

of will f ( my declaration of will.

“Someone can, of course, declar what he is prepared to put up with, and
consequently forbid the opposite by a law,” etc. (p. 256).

This prohibition is necessarily accompanied by threats. The last
antithesis is of importance for the section on crime.

Episodes. We are told on page 256 that there is no difference
between “law” and “arbitrary command, ordinance” because
both = “declaration of will”, consequently “command”. — On pages
254, 255, 260 and 263, while pretending to speak about “the State”
Stirner substitutes the Prussian state and deals with questions that are
of the greatest importance for the Vossische Zeitung, such as the
constitutional state, removability of officials, bureaucratic arrogance
and similar nonsense. The only important thing here is the discovery
that the old French parliaments insisted on their right to register
royal edicts because they wanted “to judge according to their own
right”. The registration of laws by the French parliaments came into
being at the same time as the bourgeoisie and hence the acquisition
of absolute power by the kings, for whom in face of both the feudal
nobility and foreign states it became necessary to plead an alien will

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on which their own will depended, and at the same time to give the
bourgeois some sort of guarantee. Saint Max can learn more about
this from the history of his beloved Francis I; for the rest, before
speaking about the French parliaments again, he might consult the
fourteen volumes of Des Etats generaux et autres assembles nationales,
Paris, 1788,a concerning what the French parliaments wanted or did
not want and their significance. In general it would be in place here
to introduce a short episode about the erudition of our saint who is so
desirous of conquests. Apart from theoretical works, such as the
writings of Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, as well as the Hegelian
tradition, which is his main source, apart from these meagre
theoretical sources, our Sancho uses and quotes the following
historical sources: on the French Revolution — Rutenberg’s Politische
Reden and the Bauers’ Denkwurdigkeiten; on communism — Proud-
hon, August Becker’s Volksphilosophie, the Einundzwanzig Bogen and
the Bluntschli report; on liberalism — the Vossische Zeitung, the Sach-
sische Vaterlands-Blatter, Protocols of the Baden Chamber, the Ein-
undzwanzig Bogen again and Edgar Bauer’s epoch-making workb; in
addition, here and there as historical evidence there are also quoted:
the Bible, Schlosser’s 18. Jahrhundert,c Louis Blanc’s Histoire de dix
ans, Hinrichs’ Politische Vorlesungen, Bettina’s Dies Buck gehort dem
Konig, Hess’ Triarchie ,d the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, the
Zurich Anekdota, Moriz Carriere on Cologne Cathedral, the session
of the Paris Chamber of Peers of April 25, 1844, Karl Nauwerck,
Emilia Galotti,e the Bible — in short, the entire Berlin reading-room
together with its owner, Willibald Alexis Cabanis. After this sample
of Sancho’s profound studies, one can easily understand why it is
that he finds in this world so very much that is alien, i.e., holy.

III. Crime

Note 1.

“If you allow yourself to be judged right by someone else, then you must equally
allow yourself to be judged wrong by him. If you receive justification and reward from
him, then expect also accusation and punishment from him. Right is accompanied by
wrong, legality by crime. Who — are — you? — You — are — a — criminalll” (p. 262).

a By Charles Joseph Mayer. — Ed.

Edgar Bauer, Die liberalen Bestrebungen in Deutschland. — Ed.

Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, Geschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und des
neunzehnten bis zum Sturz des franzosischen Kaiserreichs. — Ed.

Moses Hess, Die europaische Triarchie. — Ed.

The reference is to Moriz Carriere, Der Kolner Dom als freie deutsche Kirche ;
Francois Guizot, Discours dans la chambre des pairs le 25 avril 1844 ; Karl Nauwerck,
Ueber die Theilruihme am Sto.ate ; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti. — Ed.

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The code civil is accompanied by the code penal, the code penal by the
code de commerce. Who are you? You are a commergantl

Saint Sancho could have spared us this nerve-shattering surprise.
In his case the words: “If you allow yourself to be judged right by
someone else, then you must equally allow yourself to be judged
wrong by him” have lost all meaning if they are intended to add a
new definition; for one of his earlier equations already states: If you
allow yourself to be judged right by someone else, then you allow
yourself to be judged by alien right, hence your wrong.

A. Simple Canonisation of Crime and Punishment

a) Crime

As regards crime, we have already seen that this is the name for a
universal category of the egoist in agreement with himself, the
negation of the holy, sin. In the previously given antitheses and
equations concerning examples of the holy (state, right, law), the
negative relation of the ego to these holies, or the copula, could also
be called crime, just as about Hegelian logic, which is likewise an
example of the holy, Saint Sancho can also say: I am not Hegelian
logic, I am a sinner against Hegelian logic. Since he was speaking of
right, state, etc., he should now have continued: another example of
sin or crime are what are called juridical or political crimes. Instead of
this, he again informs us in detail that these crimes are

sin against the holy,

.» „ the fixed idea,

»* , , the spectre,

” ” “Man”.

“Criminals exist only against something holy ” (p. 268).

“ Only owing to the holy does the criminal code exist ” (p. 318).

“Crimes arise from the fixed idea ” (p. 269).

“One sees here that it is again ‘man’ who also creates the concept of crime, of sin,
and thereby also of right.” (Previously it was the reverse.) “A man in whom I do not
recognise man is a sinner” (p. 268).

Note 1.

“Can I assume that someone commits a crime against me” (this is asserted in
opposition to the French people in the revolution), “without also assuming that he
ought to act as I consider right? And actions of this kind I call the right, the good, etc.,
those deviating from this — a crime. Accordingly I think that the others ought to aim
with me at the same goal ... as beings who should obey some sort of ‘rational’ law”
(Vocation! Designation! Task! The Holy!!!). “I lay down what man is and what it means

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

to act truly as a man, and I demand from each that this law should become for him the
norm and the ideal; in the reverse case he proves himself a sinner and criminal ...” (pp.
[267,] 268).

At the same time, he sheds an anxious tear at the grave of those
“proper people” who in the epoch of terror were slaughtered by the
sovereign people in the name of the holy. Further, by means of an
example, he shows how the names of real crimes can be construed
from this holy-point of view.

“If, as in the revolution, this spectre, man, is understood to mean the ‘good citizen’,
then the familiar ‘political transgressions and crimes’ are brought about from this
concept of man.” (He should have said: this concept, etc., brings up the familiar
crimes) (p. 268).

A brilliant example of the extent to which credulity is Sancho’s
predominant quality in the section on crime is furnished by his
transformation of the sansculottes of the revolution into “good
citizens” of Berlin through a synonymical abuse of the word citoyen.
According to Saint Max, “good citizens and loyal officials” are
inseparable. Hence “Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so
on” would be “loyal officials”, whereas Danton was responsible fora
cash deficit and squandered state money. Saint Sancho has made a
good start for a history of the revolution for the Prussian townsman
and villager.

Note 2.

Having thus described for us political and juridical crime as an
example of crime in general — namely his category of crime, sin,
negation, enmity, insult, contempt for the holy, disreputable
behaviour towards the holy — Saint Sancho can now confidently
declare:

“In crime, the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked the holy”
(p. 319).

In this passage all the crimes hitherto committed are assigned to
the credit of the egoist in agreement with himself, although sub-
sequently we shall have to transfer a few of them to the debit side.
Sancho imagines that hitherto crimes have been committed only in
order to mock at “the holy” and to assert oneself not against things,
but against the holy aspect of things. Because the theft committed by
a poor devil who appropriates someone else’s taler can be put in the
category of a crime against the law% for that reason the poor devil
committed the theft just because of a desire to break the law. In
exactly the same way as in an earlier passage Jacques le bonhomme
imagined that laws are issued only for the sake of the holy, and that
thieves are sent to prison only for the sake of the holy.

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b) Punishment

Since we are at present concerned with juridical and political
crimes we discover in this connection that such crimes “in the
ordinary sense” usually involve a punishment, or, as it is written, “the
wages of sin is death”.3 After what we have already learned about
crime, it follows, of course, that punishment is the self-defence and
resistance of the holy to those who desecrate it.

Note 1.

“Punishment has sense only when it is intended as expiation for violating
something holy” (p. 316). In punishing, “we commit the folly of desiring to satisfy
right, a spectre” (the holy). “The holy must” here “defend itself against man”. (Saint
Sancho here “commits the folly” of mistaking “Man” for “the unique ones”, the
“proper egos”, etc.) (p. 318).

Note 2.

“Only owing to the holy does the criminal code exist and it disintegrates of itself
when punishment is abandoned” (p. 318).

What Saint Sancho really wants to say is: Punishment falls into
decay of itself if the criminal code is abandoned, i.e., punishment
only exists owing to the criminal code. “But is not” a criminal code
that only exists owing to punishment “all nonsense, and is not”
punishment that exists only, owing to the criminal code “also
nonsense”? (Sancho contra Hess, Wigand,b p. 186.) Sancho here
mistakes the criminal code for a textbook of theological moralitv.
Note 3.

As an example of how crime arises from the fixed idea, there is the
following:

“The sanctity of marriage is a fixed idea. From this sanctity it follows that infidelity
is a crime, and therefore a certain law on marriage” (to the great annoyance of the
“Glerman] Chambers” and of the “Emperor of all R[ussians]”, not to speak of the
“Emperor of Japan ” and the “Emperor of China”, and particularly the “Sultan”)
“imposes a shorter or longer term of punishment for that” (p. 269).

Frederick William IV, who thinks he is able to promulgate laws in
accordance with the holy, and therefore is always at loggerheads
with the whole world, can comfort himself with the thought that in
our Sancho he has found at least one man imbued with faith in the
state. Let Saint Sancho just compare the Prussian marriage law,
which exists only in the head of its author, with the provisions of the
Code civil, which are operative in practice, and he will be able to
discover the difference between holy and worldly marriage laws.94 In
the Prussian phantasmagoria, for reasons of state, the sanctity of
marriage is supposed to be enforced both upon husband and wife; in

a Romans 6 : 23. — Ed.

Max Stirner, “Recensenten Stirners”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

French practice, where the wife is regarded as the private property of
her husband, only the wife can be punished for adultery, and then
only on the demand of the husband, who exercises his property
right.

B. Appropriation of Crime and Punishment Through
Antithesis

(Violation of man’s law (of the
state’s declaration of will, of
state power), p. 259 et seq.

\ Violation of my law (of my

Crime in my sense ! = declaration of will, of my

) power), p. 256 and passim.

These two equations are counterposed as antitheses and derive
simply from the opposition of “man” and the “ego”. They merely
sum up what has been said already.

The holy punishes the “ego” — “I punish the ‘ego’.”

Crime = hostility to Man’s law i ( Hostility = crime against my
(the Holy). ) ^ law.

The criminal = the enemy or A / Enemy or opponent = criminal
opponent of the holy (the l — | against the “ego”, the cor-

Holy as a moral person). j | poreal.

Punishment = self-defence of » j My self-defence = My punish-
the holy against the “ego”, j ment of the “ego”.

Punishment = satisfaction (ven- ) Satisfaction (vengeance) = M y
geance) of man in relation to i — punishment of the “ego”,
the “ego”. I

In the last antithesis, satisfaction can also be called ^//-satisfaction,
since it is the satisfaction of me, in opposition to the satisfaction of
man.

If in the above antithetical equations only the first member is taken
into account, then one obtains the following series of simple
antitheses where the thesis always contains the holy, universal, alien
name, while the anti -thesis always contains the worldly, personal,
appropriated name.

Crime — Hostility.

Criminal — Enemy or opponent.
Punishment — My defence.

Punishment -(Satisfaction vengeance,
l self-satisfaction.

In an instant we shall say a few words about these equations and
antitheses which are so simple that even a “born simpleton” (p. 434)

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341

can master this “unique” method of thought in five minutes. But
first a few more quotations in addition to those given earlier.

Note 1.

“In relation to me you can never be a criminal but only an opponent” (p. 268), —
and “enemy” in the same sense on p. 256. — Crime as the hostility of man is illustrated
on page 268 by the example of the “enemies of the Fatherland”. — “ Punishment ought”
(a moral postulate) “to be replaced by satisfaction, which again cannot aim at satisfying
right or justice, but at giving vs satisfaction” (p. 318).

Note 2.

While Saint Sancho attacks the halo (the windmill) of existing
power, he does not even understand this power, let alone come to
grips with it; he only advances the moral demand that the relation of
the ego to it should be formally changed. (See “Logic”.a)

“I am forced to put up with the fact” (bombastic assurance) “that he” (viz., my
enemy, who has a few million people behind him) “treats me as his enemy; but I shall
never permit him to treat me as his creature or to make his reason or
unreasonableness my guiding principle” (p. 256, where he allows the aforesaid
Sancho a very restricted freedom, namely the choice between allowing himself to be
treated as his creature or of suffering the 3,300 lashes imposed by Merlin on his
posa, ierns. This freedom is allowed him by any criminal code which, it is true, does not
first ask the aforesaid Sancho in what form it should declare its hostility to him). —
“But even if you impress your opponent as a force” (being for him an “impressive
force ) “vou do not on that account become a sanctified authority; unless he is a
wretch. He is not obliged to respect you and pay regard to you even if he has to be on his
guard against you and your power” (p. 258).

Here Saint Sancho himself appears as a “wretch” when with the
greatest seriousness he hagglesb about the difference between “to
impress” and “to be respected”, “to be on one’s guard” and to “have
regard for” — a difference of a sixteenth part at most. When Saint
Sancho is “on his guard” against someone,

‘vhe gives himself over to reflection, and he has an object which he has in view, which he
respects and which inspires him with reverence and fear” (p. 115).

In the above equations, punishment, vengeance, satisfaction, etc.,
are depicted as coming only from me; inasmuch as Saint Sancho is
the object of satisfaction, the antitheses can be turned round: then
self-satisfaction is transformed into another-getting-satisfaction-
with-regard-to-me or the prejudicing-of-my-satisfaction.

Note 3.

The very same ideologists who could imagine that right, law, state,
etc., arose from a general concept, in the final analysis perhaps the

a This volume, p. 286. — Ed.

b In the original a pun on the word Schacher which Stirner uses in the passage
quoted — Schacher means “wretch” or “robber”, while schachem means “to barter”
“to haggle”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engel;

concept of man, and that they were put into effect for the sake of this
concept — these same ideologists can, of course, also imagine that
crimes are committed purely because of a wanton attitude towards
some concept, that crimes, in general, are nothing but making
mockery of concepts and are only punished in order to do justice to
the insulted concepts. Concerning this we have already said what was
necessary in connection with right, and still earlier in connection with
hierarchy, to which we refer the reader.

In the above-mentioned antitheses, the canonised defini-
tions— crime, punishment, etc. — are confronted with the name of
another definition, which Saint Sancho in his favourite fashion
extracts from these first definitions and appropriates for himself This
new definition, which, as we have said, appears here as a mere name,
being worldly is supposed to contain the direct individual relation
and express the factual relations. (See “Logic”.) The history of
right shows that in the earliest, most primitive epochs these
individual, factual relations in their crudest form directly consti-
tuted right. With the development of civil society, hence with the
development of private interests into class interests, the relations of
right underwent changes and acquired a civilised form. They were
no longer regarded as individual, but as universal relations. At the
same time, division of labour placed the protection of the conflicting
interests of separate individuals into the hands of a few persons,
whereby the barbaric enforcement of right also disappeared. Saint
Sancho’s entire criticism of right in the above-mentioned antitheses is
limited to declaring the civilised form of* legal relations and the
civilised division of labour to be the fruit of the “fixed idea”, of the
holy, and, on the other hand, to claiming for himself the barbaric
expression of relations of right and the barbaric method of settling
conflicts. For him it is all only a matter of names; he does not touch
on the content itself, since he does not know the real relations on
which these different forms of right are based, and in the juridical
expression of class relations perceives only the idealised names of
those barbaric relations. Thus, in Stirner’s declaration of will, we
rediscover the feud; in hostility, self-defence, etc. — a copy of
club-law and practice of the old feudal mode of life; in satisfaction,
vengeance, etc. — the jus talionis, the old German Gewere, compensatio,
satisfactio — in short, the chief elements of the leges barbarorum and
consuetudines feudorum ,95 which Sancho has appropriated for himself
and taken to his heart not from libraries, but from the tales of his
former master about Amadis of Gaul. In the final analysis, therefore,
Saint Sancho again arrives merely at an impotent moral injunction
that everybody should himself obtain satisfaction and carry out

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punishment. He believes Don Quixote’s assurance that by a mere
moral injunction he can without more ado convert the material
forces arising from the division of labour into personal forces. How
closely juridical relations are linked with the development of these
material forces due to the division of labour is already clear from the
historical development of the power of the law courts and the
complaints of the feudal lords about the legal development. (See,
e.g., Monteil, loc. cit.,a XIVe, XVe siecle.) It was just in the epoch
between the rule of the aristocracy and the rule of the bourgeoisie,
when the interests of two classes came into conflict, when trade
between the European nations began to be important, and hence
international relations themselves assumed a bourgeois character, it
was just at that time that the power of the courts of law began to be
important, and under the rule of the bourgeoisie, when this broadly
developed division of labour becomes absolutely essential, the power
of these courts reaches its highest point. What the servants of the
division of labour, the judges and still more the professores juris,
imagine in this connection is a matter of the greatest indifference.

C. Crime in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Sense

We saw above that crime in the ordinary sense, by being falsified,
was put to the credit of the egoist in the extraordinary sense. Now
this falsification becomes obvious. The extraordinary egoist now
finds that he commits only extraordinary crimes, which have to be set
against the ordinary crimes. Therefore we debit the aforesaid egoist
with the ordinary crimes, which have been previously entered into
the credit column.

The struggle of the ordinary criminals against other people’s
property can also be expressed as follows (although this holds good
of any competitor):

that they — “seek other people’s goods” (p. 265),
seek holy goods,

seek the holy , and in this way the ordinary criminal
is transformed into a “believer” (p. 265).

But this reproach which the egoist in the extraordinary sense levels
against the criminal in the ordinary sense is only an apparent
one — for it is indeed he himself who strives for the halo of the whole
world. The real reproach that he levels against the criminal is not
that he seeks “ the holy”, but that he seeks “goods”.

After Saint Sancho has built himself a “world of his own, a
heaven”, namelv this time an imaginary world of feuds and

a This volume, p. 220 .—Ed.

1 3—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

knights-errant, transferred to the modern world, after he has at the
same time given documentary evidence of his difference, as a
knightly criminal, from ordinary criminals, after this he once more
undertakes a crusade against “dragons and ostriches, hobgoblins’’,3
“ghosts, apparitions and fixed ideas”. His faithful servant, Szeliga,
gallops reverently after him. As they wend their way, however, there
occurs the astounding adventure of the unfortunate ones who were
being dragged off to some place they had no wish to go to, as
described in Chapter XXII of Cervantes. For while our knight-
errant and his servant Don Quixote were jogging along their path,
Sancho raised his eyes and saw coming towards him some dozen men
on foot manacled and bound together by a long chain, accompanied
by a commissar and four gendarmes, belonging to the holy
Hermandad,96 to the Hermandad which is holy, to the holy. When
they came close, Saint Sancho very politely asked the guards to be so
kind as to tell him why these people were being led in chains. —
They are convicts of His Majesty sent to work at Spandau,97 you
do not have to know any more. — How, cried Saint Sancho, men
being forced? Is it possible that the king can use force against
someone’s “proper ego”? In that case I take upon myself the voca-
tion of putting a stop to this force. “The behaviour of the state is
violent action, and it calls this justice. Violent action of an individu-
al, however, it calls crime.” Thereupon Saint Sancho first of all
began to admonish the prisoners, saying that they ought not to gri-
eve, that although they were “not free”, they were still their “own”,
and that although maybe their “bones” might “crack” under the lash
of the whip and that perhaps they might even have a “leg torn off”,
yet, he said, you will triumph over all that, for “no one can bind your
will”! “And I know for certain that there is no witchcraft in the
world that could direct and compel the will, as some simpletons
imagine; for the will is our free arbitrary power and there is no
magic herb or spell that can subdue it.” Yes, “your will no one can
bind and your ill will remains free!”

But since this sermon did not pacify the convicts, who began one
after the other to relate how they had been unjustly condemned,
Sancho said: “Dear brethren, from what you have related it has
become clear to me that, although you have been punished for your
crimes, yet the punishment which you are suffering gives you little
pleasure and that hence you are reluctant to receive it and do not
look forward to it. And it is highly possible that the cause of your
ruin is pusillanimity on the rack in one case, poverty in another, lack

Cf. Isaiah 34 : 13-14.— Ed.

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345

of favour in a third and, finally, the judge's unfair judgment, and
that you have not been given the justice that was your due, ‘your right’. All
this compels me to show you why heaven sent me into the world. But
since the wisdom of the egoist in agreement with himself prescribes
not doing by force what can be done by agreement, I hereby request
the commissar and gendarmes to release you and let you go your
ways. Moreover, my dear gendarmes, these unfortunates have done
you no harm. It does not behove egoists in agreement with
themselves to become the executioners of other unique ones who
have done them no harm. Evidently, with you ‘the category of the
one who has been robbed stands in the forefront’. Why do you show
such ‘zeal’ in your actions ‘against crime’? ‘Verily, verily I say unto
you, you are enthusiastic for morality, you are filled with the idea of
morality’, ‘You persecute all those who are hostile to it’ — ‘Owing to
your oath as officials’, you are bringing these poor convicts ‘to
prison’, you are the holy! Therefore release these people voluntari-
ly. If you do not, you will have to reckon with me, who ‘overthrows
nations with one puff of the living ego’, who ‘commits the most
unmeasured desecration’ and ‘is not afraid even of the Moon’.”

“This is a fine piece of impudence indeed!” cried the commissar.
“You’d do better to put that basin straight on your head and be on
your way!”

Saint Sancho, however, infuriated by this Prussian rudeness,
couched his lance and rushed at the commissar with as much speed
as the “apposition” is capable of, so that he immediately threw him to
the ground. There ensued a general melee, during which the
convicts freed themselves from their chains, a gendarme threw
Szeliga-Don Quixote into the Landwehrgraben 98 or sheep’s ditch
[ Schafgraben ], and Saint Sancho performed the most heroic feats in
his struggle against the holy. A few minutes later, the gendarmes
were scattered, Szeliga crept out of the ditch and the holy was
abolished for the time being.

Then Saint Sancho gathered round him the liberated convicts and
addressed them as follows (pp. 265, 266 of “the book”):

“What is the ordinary criminal” (the criminal in the ordinary sense) “but a man
who has committed the fatal mistake” (a fatal story-teller for the citizen and the
countryman!) “of striving after what belongs to the people instead of seeking what is
his own? He has desired the contemptible” (a general muttering among the convicts at
this moral judgment) “goods of another, he has done what believers do who aspire to
what belongs to God” (the criminal as a noble soul). “What does the priest do who
admonishes the criminal? He tells him of the great violation of right he has committed
by his action in desecrating what the state has sanctified, the property of the state,
which also includes the life of the state’s subjects. Instead of this the priest might have
done better to reproach the criminal with having besmirched himself” (titters among

13*

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the convicts at this egoistical appropriation of banal clerical phraseology) “by not
despising the alien but regarding it as worthy of being robbed’ (murmuring among the
convicts). “He could have done so, were he not a priest” (one of the convicts: “In the
ordinary sense!”). I, however, “speak with the criminal as with an egoist, and he will be
ashamed” (shameless, loud cheers from the criminals, who do not wish to be called
upon to feel shame), “not because he has committed a crime against your laws and
your goods, but because he considered it worth while to circumvent your laws” (this
refers only to “circumvention in the ordinary sense”; elsewhere, however, “I go
round a rock so long as I am unable to blow it up” and I “circumvent”, for example,
even the “censorship”), “and to desire your goods” (renewed cheers); “he will be
ashamed...”

Gines de Passamonte, the arch-thief, who in general was not very
patient, shouted: “Are we then to do nothing but feel ashamed, be
submissive, when a priest in the extraordinary sense ‘admonishes’
us?”

“He will be ashamed,” continues Sancho, “that he did not despise you, together
with what is yours, that he was too little of an egoist.” (Sancho here applies an alien
measure to the egoism of the criminal. In consequence, a general bellowing breaks out
among the convicts; in some confusion, Sancho gives way, turning with a rhetorical
gesture to the absent “good burghers”.) “But you cannot speak to him egoistically, for
you have not the stature of a criminal, you ... perpetrate nothing.”

Gines again interrupts: “What credulity, my good man! Our
prison warders perpetrate all kinds of crimes, they embezzle, they
defraud, they commit rape [...a]

[B. My Intercourse]

[/. Society ]w

again he reveals only his credulity. The reactionaries knew
already that by the constitution the bourgeoisie abolishes the
naturally arisen state and establishes and makes its own state, that “ le
pouvoir constituant, qui etait dans le temp 5” naturally “passa dans la
volonte humaine” ,b that “this fabricated state was like a fabricated,
painted tree”,c etc. See Fievee’s Correspondance politique et adminis-
trative, Paris, 1815, Appel a la France contre la division des opinions,
Le drapeau blanc by Sarran aine,d the Gazette de France of the Resto-
ration period, and the earlier works of Bonald, de Maistre, etc. The
liberal bourgeois, in turn, reproach the old republicans — about

a Twelve pages of the manuscript are missing here. — Ed.

b “The constitutional power which had been shaped in the course of time had
permeated the human will.” Lourdoueix, “Appel a la France contre la division des
opinions” (quoted from Karl Wilhelm Lancizolle’s book Ueber Ursachen, Character und
Folgen der Julitage). — Ed.

* Karl Wilhelm Lancizolle, op. cit. — Ed.

Sarran the elder. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

347

whom they obviously know as little as Saint Max knows about the
bourgeois state — on the grounds that their patriotism is nothing but
“une passion factice envers un etre abstrait, une idee generate ”a (Benj.
Constant, De Vesprit de conquete, Paris, 1814, p. 48), whereas the
reactionaries accused the bourgeois on the grounds that their polit-
ical ideology is nothing but “ une mystification que la classe aisee fait
subir d celles qui ne le sont pas ” ( Gazette de France, 1831, Fevrierb).

On page 295, Saint Sancho declares that the state is “an institution
for making the nation Christian”, and all he can say about the basis
of the state is that it “is held together” with the “cement” of “respect
for the law”, or that the holy “is held together” by respect (the holy
as link) for the holy (p. 314).

Note 4.

“If the state is holy, there must be censorship” (p. 316). “The French Government
does not contest freedom of the press as a right of man, but it demands a guarantee
from the individual that he is really a human being.” ( Quel bonhomme!c Jacques le
bonhomme is “called upon” to study the September Laws100) (p. 380).

Note 5, in which we find the most profound explanations about the
various forms of the state, which Jacques le bonhomme makes
independent and in which he sees only different attempts to realise
the true state.

“The republic is nothing but absolute monarchy, for it makes no difference whether
the monarch is called prince or people, since both are majesties” (the holy)....
“Constitutionalism is a step further than the republic, for it is the state in the process
of dissolution.”

This dissolution is explained as follows:

“In the constitutional state ... the government wants to be absolute, and the people
wants to be absolute. These two absolutes” (i.e., holies) “will destroy one another”
(p. 302). “I am not the state, I am the creative negation of the state”; “thereby all
questions” (about the constitution, etc.) “sink into their true nothing” (p. 310).

He should have added that these propositions about forms of the
state are merely a paraphrase of this “nothing”, whose sole creation
is the proposition given above: I am not the state. Saint Sancho, just
like a German school-master, speaks here of “the republic,” which is,
of course, far older than constitutional monarchy, e.g., the Greek
republics.

That in a democratic, representative state like North America class
conflicts have already reached a form which the constitutional
monarchies are only just being forced to approach — about this, of

a “An artificial passion directed towards something abstract, a general idea.” — Ed.

b “A deception with which the wealthy class deludes those that are not wealthy.”
Quoted from Karl Wilhelm Lancizolle, op. cit. — Ed.

c What a simpleton. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

course, he knows nothing. His phrases about constitutional monar-
chy prove that since 1842 by the Berlin calendar101 he has learned
nothing and forgotten nothing.1

Note 6.

“The state owes its existence only to the contempt which I have for myself”, and
“with the disappearance of this disdain it will fade away entirely” (it seems that it
depends solely on Sancho how soon all the states on earth will “fade away”. Repetition
of Note 3 in the reversed equation, see “Logic”)b: “It exists only when it is superior to
me, only as might [ Macht ] and the mighty [Machtiger]. Or" (a remarkable or which proves
just the opposite of what it is intended to prove) “can you imagine a state the
inhabitants of which in all their entirety” (a jump from “I” to “we”) “ attach no
importance to it [sich allesamt nichts aus ihm machen ]?” (p. 377).

There is no need to dwell on the synonymy of the words “ Macht ”,
“ Machtig’ and “machen”.

From the fact that in any state there are people who attach
importance to it, i.e., who, in the state and thanks to the state,
themselves acquire importance, Sancho concludes that the state is a
power standing above these people. Here again it is only a matter of
getting the fixed idea about the state out of one’s mind. Jacques le
bonhomme continues to imagine that the state is a mere idea and he
believes in the independent power of this idea of the state. He is the
true “politician who believes in the state, is possessed by the state”
(p. 309). Hegel idealises the conception of the state held by the
political ideologists who still took separate individuals as their point
of departure, even if it was merely the will of these individuals;
Hegel transforms the common will of these individuals into the
absolute will, and Jacques le bonhomme bona fide accepts this
idealisation of ideology as the correct view of the state and, in this
belief, criticises it by declaring the Absolute to be the Absolute.

5. Society as Bourgeois Society

We shall spend somewhat more time on this chapter because, not
unintentionally, it is the most confused of all the confused chapters
in “the book”, and because at the same time it proves most strikingly
how little our saint succeeds in getting to know things in their
mundane shape. Instead of making them worldly, he makes them
holy by “giving” the reader the “benefit” only of his own holy
conception. Before coming to bourgeois society proper, we shall hear
some new explanations about property in general and in its relation

a Paraphrase of the French saying: “Ils n’ont rien appris ni rien oublie ” (“They have
learned nothing and forgotten nothing”); when it was first coined, shortly after the
French Revolution, it was used in relation to the royalists. — Ed.
b This volume, pp. 280-81. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

349

to the state. These explanations appear the newer because they give
Saint Sancho the opportunity to put forward again his most favourite
equations about right and the state and thus to give his “treatise”
“more manifold transformations” and “refractions”. We need, of
course, only quote the last members of these equations since the
reader will still have in mind their context from the chapter “My
Power”.

Private property or bourgeois

property = Not my property
= Holy property
= Property of others
= Respected property or respect
for the property of others
= Property of man (pp. 327, 369).

From these equations one obtains at once the following antitheses:
Property in the bourgeois i J Property in the egoistical sense
sense f = |(p. 327).

“Property of man ” = “My property.”

(“Human belongings” == My belongings.) P. 324.

Equations: Man = Right

= State power.

Private property ori (

bourgeois property J — ^Rightful property (p. 324),

= mine by virtue of right (p. 332),
= guaranteed property,

= property of others,

= property belonging to another,

= property belonging to right,

= property by right (pp. 367, 332),
= a concept of right,

= something spiritual,

= universal,

= fiction,

= pure thought,

= fixed idea,

= spectre,

= property of the spectre

(pp. 368, 324, 332, 367, 369).

Private property = Property of right.

Right = Power of the state.

Private property = Property in the power
of the state

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

= State property, or also
Property = State property.

State property = My non-property.

State = The sole owner (pp. 339, 334).
We now come to the antitheses:

Private property — Egoistical property.

Authorised by right ) ( Empowered by me

(by the state, by Man) 1 — ! to have property
to have property J [ (p. 339).

Mine by virtue of right — Mine by virtue of my power or

force (p. 332).

Property given by

another — Property taken by me (p. 339).
Rightful property — Rightful property of another is
of others what I consider right (p. 339),
which can be repeated in a hundred other formulas if, for example,
one puts plenary powers instead of power, or uses formulas already
given.

Private property = \ My property = property
alien relation to the J — relation to the property of all
property of all others J others.

Or also:

Property comprising a few Property comprising every-

objects thing (p. 343).

Alienation [Entfremdung], as the relation or link in the above
equations, can be expressed also in the following antitheses:

Private property — Egoistical property.

“To behave towards property as
towards something holy,
a spectre”,
“to respect it”,
“to have respect for
property” (p. 324).

“To renounce the holy rela-
tion towards property”,
no longer to regard it as alien,
no longer to fear the spectre,
to have no respect for property,

to have the property of lack
of respect (pp. 368, 340, 343).

The modes of appropriation contained in the above equations and
antitheses will be dealt with when we come to the “union”, but as for

the time being we are still in the “holy society”, we are here only
concerned with canonisation.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 351

Note. In the section “Hierarchy” we already dealt with the
question why the ideologists can regard the property relation as a
relation of “Man”, the different forms of which in different epochs
are determined by the individuals’ conception of “Man”. It suffices
here to refer the reader to that analysis.

Treatise 1. On the parcellation of landed property, the redemption
of feudal obligations and the swallowing-up of small landed property
by large landed property.

All these things are deduced from holy property and the equation:
bourgeois property = respect for the holy.

1) “Property in the bourgeois sense means holy property, in such a way that I must
respect your property. ‘Respect for property!’ Hence the politicians would like everyone
to possess his little piece of property and by their endeavour have partly brought
about an incredible parcellation” (pp. 327, 328). — 2) “The political liberals see to it
that as far as possible all feudal obligations are redeemed and that everyone is a free
master on his land, even though this land has only such a quantity of ground” (the
land has a quantity of ground!) “that it can be adequately fertilised by the manure from
one person.... No matter how small it is, so long as it is one’s own, i.e., a respected
property! The more such owners there are, the more free people and good patriots has
the state” (p. 328). — 3) “Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on respect,
humanity, the virtues of love. Therefore it experiences constant vexation. For in
practice people respect nothing, and every day small properties are being bought up by
large landowners, and the ‘free people’ are turned into day-labourers. If, on the other
hand, the ‘small owners’ had borne in mind that large property also belongs to them,
they would not have respectfully excluded themselves from it and would not have
become excluded” (p. 328).

1) Here, therefore, first of all the whole development of
parcellation, about which Saint Sancho knows only that it is the holy,
is explained from a mere idea which “the politicians” “have got into
their heads”. Because “the politicians” demand “respect for proper-
ty”, hence they “would like” parcellation, which moreover was
carried out everywhere by not respecting other people’s property!
“The politicians” actually have “partly brought about an incredible
parcellation”. It was therefore through the action of the “politicians”
that in France even before the revolution, just as today in Ireland
and partly in Wales, parcellation had long existed in agriculture, and
that capital and all other conditions were lacking for large-scale
cultivation. Incidentally, how much “politicians” nowadays “would
like” to carry out parcellation, Saint Sancho could see from the fact
that all the French bourgeois are dissatisfied with parcellation, both
because it weakens competition among the workers and also for
political reasons; further, from the fact that all reactionaries (as
Sancho could see if only from the Erinnerungen of the old Arndt)

See this volume, pp. 183-84. — Ed.

352

Karl Marx and Frederick Engel:

regarded parcellation simply as the conversion of landed property
into modern, industrial, marketable, desanctified property. We shall
not here set forth for our saint the economic reasons why the
bourgeoisie, as soon as it has attained power, must carry out this
conversion, which can come about both by the abolition of land rents
that exceed profit and by parcellation. Nor shall we explain to him
that the form in which this conversion takes place depends on the
level of development of industry, trade, shipping, etc., in the country
concerned. The propositions cited above about parcellation are
nothing more than a bombastic circumlocution of the simple fact that
in various places “here and there” considerable parcellation
exists — expressed in our Sancho’s canonising manner of speech,
which suits everything and nothing. For the rest, Sancho’s proposi-
tions given above contain merely the fantasies of the German petty
bourgeois about parcellation which, of course, is for him the alien,
“the holy”. Cf. “Political Liberalism”.

2) The redemption of feudal obligations, a misery which occurs
only in Germany, where the governments were only compelled to
carry it through by the more advanced conditions in neighbouring
countries and by financial difficulties — this redemption is held by
our saint to be something that “the political liberals” desire in order
to produce “free people and good burghers”. Sancho’s horizon
again does not go beyond the Pomeranian Landtag and the Saxon
Chamber of Deputies. This German redemption of feudal obliga-
tions never led to any political or economic results and, being a
half-measure, remained without any effect at all. Sancho knows
nothing, of course, about the historically important redemption of
feudal obligations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which
was due to the commencing development of trade and industry and
the landowners’ need for money.

The very same people who, like Stein and Vincke, wanted the
redemption of feudal obligations in Germany in order, as Sancho
believes, to make good burghers and free people, found later on that
in order to produce “good burghers and free people” feudal
obligations ought to be restored, as is just now being attempted in
Westphalia. From which it follows that “respect”, like the fear of
God, is useful for all purposes.

3) The “buying-up” of small landed property by the “large
landowners” takes place, according to Sancho, because in practice
“respect for property” does not occur. Two of the most common
consequences of competition — concentration and buying-up — and
competition as a whole, which does not exist without concentration,
seem here to our Sancho to be violations of bourgeois property, which

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353

moves within the sphere of competition. Bourgeois property is
already violated by the very fact of its existence. In Sancho’s opinion,
it is not possible to buy anything without attacking property.* How
deeply Saint Sancho has penetrated into the concentration of landed
property can already be deduced from the fact that he sees in it only
the most obvious act of concentration, the mere “buying-up”.
Incidentally, from what Sancho says it is not possible to perceive to
what extent small landowners cease to be owners by becoming
day-labourers. Indeed, on the following page (p. 329) Sancho
himself with great solemnity advances as an argument against
Proudhon that they continue to be “owners of the share remaining
to them in the utilisation of the land”, namely owners of wages. “It
can sometimes be observed in history” that large landed property
swallows up small landed property, and then in turn the small
swallows up the large, two phenomena which, in Saint Sancho’s
opinion, become peacefully resolved into the adequate reason that
“in practice people respect nothing”. The same thing holds good for
the other manifold forms of landed property. And then the wise “if
the small owners had”, etc.! In the Old Testament we saw how Saint
Sancho, in accordance with the speculative method, made earlier
generations reflect on the experiences of later ones; now we see how,
in accordance with his ranting method, he complains that the earlier
generations have failed to bear in mind not only the thoughts of later
generations about them, but also his own nonsense. What school-
masterly “ wisdom ” a! If the terrorists had considered that they would
bring Napoleon to the throne, if the English barons at the time of
Runnymede and Magna Charta had considered that in 1849 the
Corn Laws102 would be repealed, if Croesus had considered that
Rothschild would surpass him in riches, if Alexander the Great had
considered that Rotteckb would judge him and that his Empire would
fall into the hands of the Turks, if Themistocles had considered that
he would defeat the Persians in the interests of Otto the Child,103 if
Hegel had considered that he would be exploited in such a “vulgar”
way by Saint Sancho, if, if, if! About what kind of “small owners”
does Saint Sancho fancy that he is talking? About the propertyless
peasants who only became “small owners” as a result of the parcelling

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Saint Sancho arrives at
this nonsense because he mistakes the juridical, ideological expression of bourgeois
property for actual bourgeois property, and he cannot understand why the reality will
not correspond to this illusion of his.

a In the manuscript the Berlin dialect form Jescheitheit is used. — Ed.
Karl Rotteck, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte fur alle Stande. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

out of large landed property, or about those who are being ruined
nowadays as a result of concentration? For Saint Sancho these two
cases are as like as two drops of water. In the first case, the small
owners did not by any means exclude themselves from “large
property”, but each took possession of it insofar as he was not
excluded by others and had the power to do so. This power,
however, was not Stirner’s vaunted power, but was determined by
quite empirical relations, e.g., their development and the whole
preceding development of bourgeois society, the locality and its
greater or lesser degree of connection with the neighbourhood, the
size of the piece of land taken into possession, and the number of
those who appropriated it, the relations of industry, of intercourse,
means of communication, instruments of production, etc., etc. That
they had no intention of excluding themselves from large landed
property is evident even from the fact that many of them became
large landed proprietors themselves. Sancho makes himself ridicul-
ous even in Germany by his unreasonable demand that these
peasants should have jumped the stage of parcellation, which did not
yet exist and was at that time the only revolutionary form for them,
and that they should have thrown themselves at a bound into his
egoism in agreement with itself. Disregarding this nonsense of his, it
was not possible for these peasants to organise themselves com-
munistically, since they lacked all the means necessary for bringing
about the first condition of communist association, namely collective
husbandry, and since, on the contrary, parcellation was only one of
the conditions which subsequently evoked the need for such an
association. In general, a communist movement can never originate
from the countryside, but only from the towns.

In the second case, when Saint Sancho talks of the ruined small
owners, these still have a common interest with the big landowners as
against the wholly propertyless class and the industrial bourgeoisie.
If this common interest is absent, they lack the power to appropriate
large landed property, since they live scattered and their whole
activity and way of life make association, the first condition for such
appropriation, impossible for them, and such a movement, in its
turn, presupposes a much more general movement which by no
means depends on them

Finally, Sancho’s whole tirade amounts to this: that they ought
merely to get rid of their respect for the property of others. We shall
hear a little more about this later on.

In conclusion, let us take one more proposition ad acta. “ The point
is that in practice people respect nothing ,” so, after all, it appears that it is
not “just” a matter of “respect”.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

355

Treatise No. 2. Private property, state and right.

“If, if, if!”

“If” Saint Sancho had for one moment set aside the current ideas
of lawyers and politicians about private property, and also the
polemic against it, if he had once looked at this private property in its
empirical existence, in its connection with the productive forces of
individuals, then all his Solomon’s wisdom, with which he will now
entertain us, would have been reduced to nothing. Then it would
hardly have escaped him (although like Habakkuk he is capable de
tout104) that private property is a form of intercourse necessary for
certain stages of development of the productive forces; a form of
intercourse that cannot be abolished, and cannot be dispensed with
in the production of actual material life, until productive forces have
been created for which private property becomes a restricting fetter.
In that case it could not have escaped the reader also that Sancho
ought to have occupied himself with material relations, instead of
dissolving the whole world in a system of theological morality in
order to set against it a new system of would-be egoistical morality. It
could not have escaped him that it was a question of things altogether
different from “respect” or disrespect. “If, if, if!”

Incidentally, this “if” is only an echo of Sancho’s proposition given
above; for “if” Sancho had done all that, he obviously could not have
written his book.

Since Saint Sancho accepts in good faith the illusion of politicians,
lawyers and other ideologists which puts all empirical relations
upside-down, and, in addition, in the German manner adds
something of his own, private property for him becomes transformed into
state property, or property by right, on which he can now make an
experiment to justify his equations given above. Let us first of all
look at the transformation of private property into state property.

“The question of property is decided only by force” (on the contrary, the question
of force has so far been decided by property), “and since the state alone is the mighty
one — irrespective of whether it is a state of burghers, a state of ragamuffins” (Stirner’s
“union”) “or simply a state of human beings — it alone is the owner” (p. 333).

Side by side with the fact of the German “state of burghers” here
again fantasies invented by Sancho and Bauer appear on an equal
footing, whereas no mention is made anywhere of the historically
important state formations. First of all he transforms the state into a
person, into “the Mighty one”. The fact that the ruling class
establishes its joint domination as public power, as the state, Sancho
interprets and distorts in the German petty-bourgeois manner as
meaning that the “state” is established as a third force against this

356

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

ruling class and absorbs all power in the face of it. He proceeds now
to confirm this belief of his by means of a series of examples.

Because property under the rule of the bourgeoisie, as in all
epochs, is bound up with definite conditions, first of all economic,
which depend on the degree of development of the productive
forces and intercourse — conditions which inevitably acquire a legal
and political expression — Saint Sancho in his simplicity believes that

“the state links possession of property” ( car tel est son bon plaisir a) “just as it links
everything else, e.g., marriage, with certain conditions” (p. 335).

Because the bourgeois do not allow the state to interfere in their
private interests and give it only as much power as is necessary for
their own safety and the maintenance of competition and because
the bourgeois in general act as citizens only to the extent that their
private interests demand it, Jacques le bonhomme believes that they
are “nothing” in face of the state.

“The state is only interested in being wealthy itself; whether Michael is rich and
Peter poor is a matter of indifference to it ... in face of it both of them are nothing”
(p. 334).

On page 345 he derives the same wisdom from the fact that
competition is tolerated in the state.

Because the board of a railway is concerned about its shareholders
only insofar as they make their payments and receive their
dividends, the Berlin school-master in his innocence concludes that
the shareholders are “nothing in face of the board just as we are all
sinners in the face of God”. On the basis of the impotence of the state
in face of the activities of private property-owners Sancho proves the
impotence of private property-owners in face of the state and his
own impotence in face of both.

Further, since the bourgeois have organised the defence of their
own property in the state, and the “ego” cannot, therefore, take
away his factory “from such and such a manufacturer”, except
under the conditions of the bourgeoisie, i.e., under the conditions of
competition, Jacques le bonhomme believes that

“the state has the factory as property, the manufacturer holds it only in fee, as
possession” (p. 347).

In exactly the same way when a dog guards my house it “has” the
house “as property”, and I hold it only “in fee, as possession” from
the dog.

Since the concealed material conditions of private property are
often bound to come into contradiction with the juridical illusion

a Because it chooses to do so — a paraphrase of the concluding words of French
royal edicts. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

357

about private property — as seen, for example, in expropria-
tions— Jacques le bonhomme, concludes that

“here the otherwise concealed principle that only the state is the property-owner
whereas the individual is a feudal tenant, strikes the eye” (p. 335).

All that “strikes the eye here” is the fact that worldly property
relations are hidden from the eyes of our worthy burgher behind the
mantle of “the holy”, and that he has still to borrow a “heavenly
ladder” from China in order to “climb” to the “rung of civilisation”
attained even by school-masters in civilised countries. In the same
way as Sancho here transforms the contradictions belonging to the
existence of private property into the negation of private property, he
dealt, as we saw above, with the contradictions within the bourgeois
family.3

Since the bourgeois, and in general all the members of civil society,
are forced to constitute themselves as “we”, as a juridical person, as
the state, in order to safeguard their common interests and — if only
because of the division of labour — to delegate the collective power
thus created to a few persons, Jacques le bonhomme imagines that

“each has the use of property only so long as he bears within himself the ego of the
state or is a loyal member of society.... He who is a state-ego, i.e., a good burgher or
subject, he, as such an ego, not as his own, holds the fee undisturbed” (pp. 334, 335).

From this point of view, a person possesses a railway share only so
long as he “bears within himself” the “ego” of the board; con-
sequently it is only as a saint that one can possess a railway share.

Having in this way convinced himself of the identity of private and
state property, Saint Sancho can continue:

“That the state does not arbitrarily take away from the individual that which he has
from the state, only means that the state does not rob itself” (pp. 334, 335).

That Saint Sancho does not arbitrarily rob others of their property
only means that Saint Sancho does not rob himself, for indeed he
“ regards ” all property as his own.

One cannot demand of us that we should deal further with the rest
of Saint Sancho’ s fantasies about the state and property, e.g., that the
state “tames” and “rewards” individuals by means of property, that
out of special malice it has invented high stamp duties in order to
ruin the citizens if they are not loyal, etc., etc. and in general with the
p e tty-bourgeois German idea of the omnipotence of the state, an idea
which was already current among the old German lawyers and is
here presented in the form of grandiloquent assertions.

Finally Saint Sancho also tries to confirm his adequately proved

3 See this volume, pp. 180-81. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

identity of state and private property by means of etymological
synonymy; in doing which, however, he belabours his erudition en
ambas posaderas.

“My private property is only that which the state allows me out of its property , by
depriving [privieren] other state members of it: it is state property” (p. 339).

By chance this is just the reverse of what happened. Private
property in Rome, to which alone this etymological witticism can
relate, was in the most direct contradiction to state property. True,
the state gave the plebeians private property; in doing so it did not,
however, deprive “others” of their private property but deprived
these plebeians themselves of their state property (ager publicus*) and
their political rights, and it was precisely on that account that they
themselves were called privati, robbed ones, and not the fantastical
“other state members” of whom Saint Sancho dreams. Jacques le
bonhomme covers himself with shame in all countries, all languages
and all epochs as soon as he begins to talk about positive facts
concerning which “the holy” cannot have any knowledge a priori.

Desperation because the state swallows up all property drives
Sancho back to his innermost “indignant” self-consciousness, where
he is surprised to discov er that he is a man of letters . He expresses his
astonishment in the following remarkable words:

“In opposition to the state I feel ever more dearly that I still retain one great
power, power over myself.”

Further on this is developed thus:

“My thoughts constitute real property for me with which I can carry on trade”
(p. 339).

Thus, Stirner the “ragamuffin”, the “man of only ideal wealth”,
arrives at the desperate decision to carry on trade with the curdled,
sour milk of his thoughts.103 But what cunning does he use if the state
declares his thoughts to be contraband? Just listen to this:

“I renounce them” (which is undoubtedly very wise) “and exchange them for
others” (that is, if anyone should be such a bad businessman as to accept his exchange1^
of thoughts), “ which then become my new, purchased property” (p. 339).

Our honourable burgher will not rest until he has it in black and
white that he has bought his property honestly. Here one sees the
consolation of the Berlin burgher in the face of all his political
calamities and police tribulations: “Thoughts are free of customs
duty!”c

* Common land. — Ed.

In the original a pun, for the German word Wechsel, used here, can mean
either “change”, “alteration”, “exchange” or “bill of exchange”. — Ed.

‘ Martin Luther, Von weltlicher Obrigkeit. — Ed.

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359

The transformation of private property into state property
reduces itself, in the final analysis, to the idea that the bourgeois has
possessions only as a member of the bourgeois species, a species
which as a whole is called the state and which invests individuals with
the fief of property. Here again the matter is put upside-down. In
the bourgeois class, as in every other, it is only personal conditions
that are developed into common and universal conditions under
which the separate members of the class possess and live. Although
previously philosophical illusions of this kind could be current in
Germany, they have now become completely ludicrous, since world
trade has adequately proved that bourgeois gain is quite indepen-
dent of politics, but that politics, on the other hand, is entirely
dependent on bourgeois gain. Already in the eighteenth century,
politics was so dependent on trade that when, for example, the
French Government wanted to raise a loan, the Dutch demanded
that a private individual should stand security for the state.

That “my worthlessness” or “pauperism” is the “realisation of the
value” or the “existence” of the “state” (p. 336) is one of the
thousand and one Stirnerian equations which we mention here only
because in this connection we shall hear something new about
pauperism.

“Pauperism is my worthlessness, the phenomenon that I cannot realise my value.
Hence state and pauperism are one and the same.... The state is always trying to derive
benefit from me, i.e., to exploit me, make use of me, to utilise me, even though this
utilisation consists merely in my providing proles'1 (proletariat). It wants me to be its
creature” (p. 336).

Apart from the fact that one sees here how little it depends on him
to realise his value, although everywhere and at all times he can
assert his peculiarity, and that here once again, in contradiction to
former statements, essence and appearance are totally divorced from
each other, we have again the above-mentioned petty-bourgeois view
of our bonhomme that the “state” wants to exploit him. The only
further point of interest to us is the ancient Roman etymological
derivation of the word “proletariat”, which is here naively smuggled
into the modern state. Does Saint Sancho really not know that
wherever the modern state has developed, “providing proles ” is for
the state, i.e., the official bourgeois, precisely the most unpleasant
activity of the proletariat? Perhaps he ought to translate Malthus and
Minister Duchatel into German, b for his own benefit? just now, Saint

Offspring. — Ed.

Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population ; Charles Marie
Duchatel, De la Charite. — Ed.

360

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Sancho, as a German petty bourgeois, “felt” “ever more clearly” that
“in opposition to the state he still retained one great power”,
namely — the power to think in defiance of the state. If he were an
English proletarian he would have felt that he “retained the power”
to produce children in defiance of the state.

Another jeremiad against the state! Another theory of pauperism!
To start with he, as “ego”, “creates” “flour, linen or iron and coal”,
thereby from the outset abolishing division of labour. Then he
begins “to complain” “at length” that his work is not j^aid for at its
value, and in the first instance he comes into conflict with those who
pay for it. Then the state comes between them in the role of
“conciliator”.

“ If I am not satisfied with the price it” (i.e., the state) “pays for my commodity and
labour, if instead I mvself endeavour to fix the price of my commodity, i.e., try to see
that it is lucrative for me, I come into conflict in the first instance” (a great “in the first
instance”! — not with the state, but) “with the buyers of the commodity” (p. 337).

If then he wants to enter into “direct relation” with these buyers,
i.e., “seize them by the throat”, the state “intervenes”, “tears man
from man” (although it was not a matter of “man in general” but of
worker and employer or, what he lumps together in confusion, of
the seller and buyer of commodities); moreover, the state does this
with the malicious intention “to put itself in the middle as spirit ”
(obviously the holy spirit).

“Workers who demand higher wages are treated as criminals as soon as they try to
achieve this by force ” (p. 337).

Once more we are presented with a bouquet of nonsense.
Mr. Senior need never have written his letters on wages3 if he had
first entered into “direct relation” with Stirner, especially as in that
case the state would hardly have “torn man from man”. Sancho here
gives the state a triple function. It first acts as a “conciliator”, then as
price fixer, and finally as “spirit”, as the holy. The fact that, after
having gloriously identified private and state property, Saint Sancho
also makes the state fix the level of wages, is testimony equally to his
great consistency and his ignorance of the affairs of this world. The
fact that in England, America and Belgium “workers who try to gain
higher wages by force” are by no means immediately treated as
“criminals”, but on the contrary quite often actually succeed in
obtaining higher wages, is also something of which our saint is
ignorant, and which disposes of his whole legend about wages. The
fact that, even if the state did not “put itself in the middle”, the
workers would gain nothing by “seizing” their employers “by the

a Nassau William Senior, Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages. — Ed.

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361

throat” or at any rate much less than through association and strikes,
that is, so long as they remain workers and their opponents
capitalists — this is also something that could be comprehended even
in Berlin. There is likewise no need to demonstrate that bourgeois
society, which is based on competition, and its bourgeois state, owing
to their whole material basis, cannot permit any struggle among the
citizens except the struggle of competition, and are bound to
intervene not as “spirit”, but with bayonets if people “seize each
other by the throat”.

Incidentally, Stirner’s idea that only the state becomes richer when
individuals become richer on the basis of bourgeois property, or that
up to now all private property has been state property, is an idea that
again puts historical relations upside-down. With the development
and accumulation of bourgeois property, i.e., with the development
of commerce and industry, individuals grew richer and richer while
the state fell ever more deeply into debt. This phenomenon was
evident already in the first Italian commercial republics; later, since
the last century, it showed itself to a marked degree in Holland,
where the stock exchange speculator Pinto drew attention to it as
early as l750,a and now it is again occurring in England. It is
therefore obvious that as soon as the bourgeoisie has accumulated
money, the state has to beg from the bourgeoisie and in the end it is
actually bought up by the latter. This takes place in a period in which
the bourgeoisie is still confronted by another class, and consequently
the state can retain some appearance of independence in relation to
both of them. Even after the state has been bought up, it still needs
money and, therefore, continues to be dependent on the bourge-
oisie; nevertheless, when the interests of the bourgeoisie demand
it, the state can have at its disposal more funds than states which are
less developed and, therefore, less burdened with debts. However,
even the least developed states of Europe, those of the Holy Alliance,
are inexorably approaching this fate, for they will be bought up by
the bourgeoisie; then Stirner will be able to console them with the
identity of private and state property, especially his own sovereign,
who is trying in vain to postpone the hour when political power
will be sold to the “burghers” who have become “angry”.

We come now to the relation between private property and right,
where we have to listen to the same stuff in another form. The
identity of state and private property is apparently given a new turn.
Political recognition of private property in law is declared to be the
basis of private property.

a Isaac Pinto, Lettre sur la Jalousie du Commerce in Traite de la Circulation et du
Credit. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“Private property lives by grace of right. It is guaranteed only in right — for
possession is not yet property — it becomes mine only with the consent of right; it is not
a fact, but a fiction, a thought. That is property by right, rightful property, guaranteed
property; it is mine not thanks to me, but thanks to right” (p. 332).

In this passage the previous nonsense about state property merely
reaches still more comical heights. We shall, therefore, pass on at
once to Sancho’s exploitation of the fictitious jus utendi et abutendi *

On page 332 we learn, besides the beautiful passage above, that
property

“is unlimited power over something which I can dispose of as I please”. But “power”
is “not something existing of itself, but exists only in the powerful ego, in me, the
possessor of power” (p. 366). Hence property is not a “thing”, “what is mine is not this
tree, but my power over it, my ability to dispose of it” (p. 366). He only knows “things”
or “egos”. “The power” which is “separated from the ego”, given independent
existence, transformed into a “spectre”, is “right”. “This perpetuated power”
(treatise on right of inheritance) “is not extinguished even when I die, but is passed on
or inherited. Things now really belong not to me, but to right. On the other hand, this
is nothing but a delusion, for the power of the individual becomes permanent, and
becomes a right, only because other individuals combine their power with his. The
delusion consists in their belief that they cannot take back their power” (pp. 366, 367).
“A dog who sees a bone in the power of another dog stands aside only if it feels it is too
weak. Man, however, respects the right of the other man to his bone.... And as here, so
in general, it is called 'human’ when something spiritual, in this case right, is seen in
everything, i.e., when everything is made into a spectre and treated as a spectre.... It is
human to regard the individual phenomenon not as an individual, but as a universal
phenomenon” (pp. 368, 369).

Thus once again the whole mischief arises from the faith of
individuals in the conception of right, which they ought to get out of
their heads. Saint Sancho only knows “things” and “egos”, and as
regards anything that does not come under these headings, as
regards all relations, he knows only the abstract concepts of them,
which for him, therefore, also become “spectres”. “On the other
hand”, it does dawn on him at times that all this is “nothing but a
delusion” and that the “power of the individual” very much depends
on whether others combine their power with his. But in the final
analysis everything is nevertheless reduced to the “illusion” that
individuals “believe that they cannot take back their power”. Once
again the railways do not “actually” belong to the shareholders, but
to the statutes. Sancho immediately puts forward the right of
inheritance as a striking example. He explains it not from the
necessity for accumulation and from the family which existed before
right, but from the juridical fiction of the prolongation of power beyond

a The right of using and consuming (also: abusing), i.e., of disposing of a thing at
will. — Ed.

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death.* However, the more feudal society passes into bourgeois
society, the more is this juridical fiction itself abandoned by the
legislation of all countries. (Cf., for example, the Code Napoleon.)
There is no need to show here that absolute paternal power and
primogeniture — both natural feudal primogeniture and the later
form — were based on very definite material relations. The same
thing is to be found among ancient peoples in the epoch of the
disintegration of the community in consequence of the development
of private life (the best proof of this is the history of the Roman right
of inheritance). In general, Sancho could not have chosen a more
unfortunate example than the right of inheritance, which in the
clearest possible way shows the dependence of right on the
relations of production. Compare, for example, Roman and
German right of inheritance. Certainly, no dog has ever made
phosphorus, bone-meal or lime out of a bone, any more than it has
ever “got into its head” anything about its “right” to a bone; equally,
it has never “entered the head” of Saint Sancho to reflect whether
the right to a bone which people, but not dogs, claim for themselves,
is not connected with the way in which people, but not dogs, utilise
this bone in production. In general, in this one example we have
before us Sancho’s whole method of criticism and his unshakable
faith in current illusions. The hitherto existing production relations
of individuals are bound also to be expressed as political and legal
relations. (See above.3) Within the division of labour these relations
are bound to acquire an independent existence over against the
individuals. All relations can be expressed in language only in the
form of concepts. That these general ideas and concepts are looked
upon as mysterious forces is the necessary result of the fact that the
real relations, of which they are the expression, have acquired
independent existence. Besides this meaning in everyday conscious-
ness, these general ideas are further elaborated and given a special
significance by politicians and lawyers, who, as a result of the division
of labour, are dependent on the cult of these concepts, and who see
in them, and not in the relations of production, the true basis of all
real property relations. Saint Sancho, who takes over this illusion

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] He could have learned
from more advanced legal systems which adequately express modern property
relations, e.g., from the Code civil, that... “The perpetuated power” which “is not
extinguished even when I die” is, in the Code civil, reduced to a minimum, and the
legal portion of children is a recognition of the material basis of the law and
particularly of the law under bourgeois rule.

This volume, p. 36. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

without examination, is thus enabled to declare that property by
right is the basis of private property, and that the concept of right is
the basis of property by right, after which he can restrict his whole
criticism to declaring that the concept of right is a concept, a spectre.
That is the end of the matter for Saint Sancho. To set his mind at
rest, we can add that in all the early law books the behaviour of two
dogs who have found a bone is regarded as right: vim vi repellere
licere ,a say the Pandects 106; idque jus natura comparatur,b by which is
meant jus quod natura omnia animalia (people and dogs) docuitc; but
that later it is “just” the organised repulsion of force by force that
becomes right.

Saint Sancho, who is now well under way, proves his erudition in
the field of the history of right by disputing a “bone” with
Proudhon.

Proudhon, he says, “tries to humbug us into believing that society is the original
possessor and sole owner of imprescriptible right; that the so-called owner has
committed theft with regard to society; that if society takes from any present-day
owner his property, it does not steal anything from him, for it is only asserting its
imprescriptible right. That is where one can get with the spectre of society as a juridical
person ” (pp. 330, 331).

In contrast to this Stirner “tries to humbug us into believing”
(pp. 340, 367, 420 and elsewhere) that we, viz., the propertyless,
presented the owners with their property, out of ignorance,
cowardice or good nature, etc., and he calls on us to take back our
gift. The difference between these two “attempts at humbugging” is
that Proudhon bases himself on a historical fact, while Saint Sancho
has only “got something into his head” in order to give the matter a
“new turn”. For recent investigations into the history of right have
established that both in Rome and among the German, Celtic and
Slav peoples the development of property had as its starting-point
communal or tribal property and that private property strictly
speaking arose everywhere by usurpation; Saint Sancho could of
course not extract this from the profound idea that the concept of
right is a concept. In relation to the legal dogmatists, Proudhon was
perfectly right when he stressed this fact and in general combated
them by means of their own premises. “That is where one can get
with the spectre” of the concept of right as a concept. Proudhon
could only have been attacked on account of his proposition quoted
above if he had defended the earlier and cruder form of property
against the private property that had developed out of this primitive

* It is permissible to repel force by force. — Ed.

And this right is fixed by nature. — Ed.

A right which nature has taught all living beings. — Ed.

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communal system. Sancho sums up his criticism of Proudhon in the
arrogant question:

“Why such a sentimental appeal for sympathy as if he were a poor victim of
robbery?” (p. 420).

Sentimentality, of which, incidentally, not a trace is to be found in
Proudhon, is only permitted towards Maritornes. Sancho really
imagines that he is a “whole fellow” compared with such a believer in
apparitions as Proudhon. He considers his inflated bureaucratic
style, of which even Frederick William IV would be ashamed, to be
revolutionary. “Blessed are those that believe.”3

On page 340 we learn:

“All the attempts to enact rational laws about property proceeded from the bay of
love into a barren ocean of definitions.”

A fitting companion to this is the equally bizarre statement:

“Intercourse hitherto has been based on love, on considerate behaviour, on care
for one another” (p. 385).

Saint Sancho here surprises himself with a striking paradox about
right and intercourse. If, however, we recall that by “love” he
understands love of “Man”, love of something existing in and for
itself, of the universal, that by love he understands the relation to an
individual or thing regarded as essence, the holy, then this
appearance of brilliance is dissipated. The oracular utterances
quoted above are then reduced to the old trivialities which have
bored us throughout the “book”, i.e., that two things, about which
Sancho knows nothing, viz., in this case hitherto existing right and
hitherto existing intercourse, are “the holy”, and that in general only
“concepts have ruled the world” up to now. The relation to the holy,
as a rule called “respect”, can on occasion also be entitled “love”.
(See “Logic”.)

Just one example of how Saint Sancho transforms legislation into a
love relation, and trade into a love-affair:

“In a Registration Bill for Ireland, the government put forward the proposal to
give the suffrage to those who pay a tax of £5 for the poor. Consequently one who
gives alms acquires political rights or, elsewhere, becomes a Knight of the Swan”
(p. 344).

It is to be noted here first of all that this “Registration Bill”
granting “political rights” was a municipal or corporation Bill or, in
more comprehensible language to Sancho, an “urban regulation”,
which was not designed to grant “political rights” but only urban
rights, the right to elect local officials. Secondly, Sancho, who
translates McCulloch, surely ought to know quite well the meaning

a Luke 1 : 45 (paraphrased). — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

of “to be assessed to the poor-rates at five pounds”.3 This does not
mean “to pay a tax of £5 for the poor”, but means to be entered on
the list of those who pay this tax as the tenants of a house the annual
rent of which amounts to £5. Our Berlin bonhomme does not know
that the poor-rate in England and Ireland is a local tax which varies in
amount in different towns and different years, so that it would be a
sheer impossibility to connect any sort of right with the payment of a
particular amount of tax. Finally, Sancho believes that the English
and Irish poor-rate is an “a/ms” ; whereas it only provides funds for a
direct and open offensive war of the ruling bourgeoisie against the
proletariat. It pays the cost of work-houses which, as is well known,
are a Malthusian deterrent against pauperism. We see how Sancho
“proceeds from the bay of love into a barren ocean of definitions”.

It may be remarked in passing that German philosophy, because it
took consciousness alone as its point of departure, was bound to end
in moral philosophy, where the various heroes squabble about true
morals. Feuerbach loves man for the sake of man, Saint Bruno loves
him because he “deserves” it ( Wigand , p. 137b), while Saint Sancho
loves “everyone”, because he likes to do so, with the consciousness of
egoism (“the book”, p. 387).

We have already seen above — in the first treatise — how the small
landed proprietors respectfully excluded themselves from large
landed property. This self-exclusion from other people’s property,
out of respect, is depicted in general as the characteristic of
bourgeois property. From this characteristic Stirner is able to explain
to himself why it is that

“within the bourgeois system, in spite of its implication that everyone should be an
owner, the majority have practically nothing” (p. 348). This “occurs because the
majority are pleased if they are owners at all, even if they are merely owners of a few
rags” (p. 349).

That the “majority” possess only “a few rags”, Szeliga regards as a
perfectly natural consequence of their love of rags.

Page 343: “Am I thus nothing but an owner? No, hitherto a person was merely an
owner, secure in possession of a plot of land by allowing others also to possess their
plot; now, however, everything belongs to me. I am the owner of everything that I need
and can take possession of.”

Just as Sancho previously made small landed proprietors respect-
fully exclude themselves from large landed property, and now
makes the small landed proprietors exclude one another, so he could

a McCulloch, Statistical Account of the British Empire. The quotation is in English in
the manuscript. — Ed.

Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristic Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

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go into more detail and make respect responsible for the exclusion of
commercial property from landed property, of industrial property
from commercial property proper, etc., and thus arrive at a totally
new political economy on the basis of the holy. He has only then to
get respect out of his head in order to abolish at one stroke division
of labour and the form of property that arises from it. Sancho gives
an example of this new political economy on page 128 of “the book”,
where he buys a needle not from a shopkeeper,2 but from respect,
and not with money paid to the shopkeeper, but with respect paid to
the needle. Incidentally, the dogmatic self-exclusion of each individu-
al from other people’s property which Sancho attacks is a purely
juridical illusion. Under the modern mode of production and
intercourse each person delivers a blow at this illusion and directs his
efforts precisely to excluding all others from the property that at
present belongs to them. How the matter stands with regard to
Sancho’s “property in everything” is clear enough from the
supplementary clause: “that I need and can take possession of”. He
explains this in more detail on page 353:

“If I say: the world belongs to me, then, properly speaking , this too is empty talk,
which has meaning only insofar as I do not respect any property of others”;

that is insofar as n on-respect of the property of others constitutes his
property.

What irks Sancho about the private property that is so dear to him
is precisely its exclusiveness, without which it would be non-
sense— the fact that besides him there are also other private owners.
For the private property of others is something holy. We shall see
how in his “union” he gets over this inconvenience. We shall find
that his egoistical property, property in the extraordinary sense, is
nothing but ordinary or bourgeois property transfigured by his
sanctifying fantasy.

Let us conclude with the following wisdom of Solomon:

“If people reach a stage where they lose respect for property, then each will
possess property ... then [in this matter, too, unions will augment the means of the
individual and safeguard his contested property” (p. 342)].b

[Treatise No. 3. On competition in the ordinary and extraordinary
sense.]

One morning the writer of these lines, in suitable attire, went to see
Herr Minister Eichhorn:

“Since things have come to nothing with the factory-owner” (for the Finance
Minister had given him neither a site nor funds to build a factory of his own, and the

a Here and below the word is in English in the original. — Ed.
b Four pages of the manuscript are missing here. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Minister of Justice had not given him permission to take the factory away from the
factory-owner — see above on bourgeois property3) “I will compete with this professor
of law; the man is a blockhead, and I, who know a hundred times more than he does,
will take his audience away from him.” — “But, my friend, did you study at a university
and get a degree?” — “No, but what of that? I fully understand all that is necessary for
teaching.” — “I’m sorry, but in this matter there is no free competition. I have nothing
against you personally, but the essential thing is lacking — a doctor’s diploma — and I,
the state, demand it.” — “So that is the freedom of competition,” sighed the author.
“Only the state, my master, gives me the possibility of competing.” Whereupon he
returned home downcast (p. 347).

In a more advanced country it would not have occurred to him
to ask the state for permission to compete with a professor of law.
But once he turns to the state as an employer and asks for
remuneration, i.e., wages, thus entering the sphere of competition,
then of course after his previous treatises about private property and
privati, communal property, the proletariat, lettres patentes, the state
and status, etc., one cannot suppose that his “solicitation will be
successful”. Judging by his past feats, the state can at best appoint
him as custodian ( custos ) of “the holy” on some domanial estate in the
backwoods of Pomerania.

By way of amusement we can “insert” here “episodically”
Sancho’s great discovery that there is no “other difference” between
the “poor” and the “rich” “than that between the resourceful and the
resourceless”0 (p. 354).

Let us plunge once more into the “barren ocean” of Stirner’s
“definitions” of competition:

“Competition is connected less" (Oh, “less”!) “with the intention of doing a
thing as well as possible, than with the intention of making it as profitable, lucrative, as
possible. For that reason people study for the sake of a post (bread-and-butter study),
cultivate obsequiousness and flattery, routine and knowledge of business; they work
for appearance. Hence while apparently it is a matter of a good performance, in reality
people aim only at a good stroke of business and monetary gain. Of course, no one
wants to be a censor, but people want to get advancement ... people are afraid of being
transferred or even more of being dismissed” (pp. 354, 355).

Let our bonhomme discover a textbook on political economy
where even theoreticians assert that in competition it is a matter of a
“good performance” or “of doing a thing as well as possible” and
not of making “it as profitable as possible”. Incidentally, in any such
book he will find it stated that under the system of private property

3 See this volume, p. 356. — Ed.

In the original der Vermogende, a capable, resourceful, powerful or wealthy
person. — Ed.

L In the original der Unvermogende, an incapable, resourceless, powerless or
destitute person. — Ed.

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highly developed compedtion, for example in England, certainly
causes a “thing” to be “done as well as possible”. Small-scale com-
mercial and industrial swindling flourishes only in conditions of
restricted competition, among the Chinese, Germans and Jews, and
in general among hawkers and small shopkeepers. But even hawking
is not mentioned by our saint; he only knows the competition of
super-numerary officials and school-masters on probation, he
reveals himself here as a downright royal-Prussian junior official. He
might just as well have given as an example of competition the
endeavour of courtiers in every age to win the favour of their
sovereign, but that lay much too far beyond his petty-bourgeois field
of vision.

After these tremendous adventures with super-numerary officials,
salaried accountants and registrars, Saint Sancho experiences his
great adventure with the famous horse Clavileno, of which the
prophet Cervantes has already spoken in the New Testament,
Chapter 41. For Sancho mounts the high horse of political economy
and determines the minimum wage by means of “the holy”. True,
here once again he reveals his innate timidity and at first refuses to
mount the flying steed that carries him far above the clouds into the
region “where hail and snow, thunder, lightning and thunderbolts
are engendered”. But the “Duke”, i.e., the “state”, encourages him
and as soon as the bolder and more experienced Szeliga-Don
Quixote has swung himself into the saddle, our worthy Sancho
climbs behind him on to the horse’s crupper. And when Szeliga’s
hand had turned the peg on the horse’s head, the horse soared high
into the air and all the ladies — especially Maritornes — cried after
them: “May egoism in agreement with itself guide you, valiant
knight, and you, still more valiant armour-bearer, and may you
succeed in liberating us from the spectre of Malambruno, of ‘the
holy’. Only keep your balance, valiant Sancho, so that you do not fall
and suffer the same fate as Phaeton, when he wanted to drive the
chariot of the sun.”

“If we assume” (he is already wavering hypothetically) “that just as order
belongs to the essence of the state, subordination too is based on its nature” (a pleasant
modulation between “essence” and “nature” — the “goats” which Sancho observed
during his flight), “then we observe that the underprivileged are excessively overcharged
and defrauded by the inferior” (it should probablv read superior) “or privileged”
(p. 357).

“If we assume ... then we observe.” It should read: then we
assume. If we assume that “superior” and “inferior” exist in the
state, then “we assume” likewise that the former are “privileged”
compared with the latter. We can, however, ascribe the stylistic

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beauty of this sentence, as also the sudden recognition of the
“essence” and “nature” of a thing, to the timidity and confusion of
our Sancho while anxiously trying to retain his balance during his
aerial flight, and to the rockets set alight under his nose. We are not
even surprised that Saint Sancho derives the consequences of
competition not from competition but from bureaucracy, and once
again makes the state determine wages.*

He does not take into consideration that the continual fluctuations
in wages explode the whole of his beautiful theory; a closer
examination of industrial conditions would certainly have provided
him with examples of a factory-owner being “overcharged” and
“defrauded” by his workers according to the universal laws of
competition, if these juridical and moral expressions had not lost all
meaning within the framework of competition.

The dwarfish form to which competition has shrunk for Sancho
once again demonstrates the naive and petty-bourgeois manner in
which world-embracing relations are reflected inside his unique
skull, and the extent to which he as a school-master is bound to
extract moral applications from all these relations and to refute them
with moral postulates. We must give this precious passage in extenso
“so that nothing should be lost”.

“As regards competition again, it exists precisely because not all persons attend to
their business and come to an understanding with one another about it. Thus, for example,
bread is needed by all the inhabitants of a town; hence they could easily come to an
agreement to establish a public bakery. Instead, they leave the supply of bread to
competing bakers. Similarly, they leave the supply of fltieat to the butchers, of wine to
the wine merchants, etc.... If I do not concern myself with my business, then I have to
be content with what it suits others to offer me. To have bread is my business, my wish
and desire, and yet people leave it to the bakers, and hope at most, thanks to their
contention, rivalry and their attempts to outstrip one another, in a word, thanks to
their competition, to get an advantage which people could not count on under the
guild-system, when the right to bake bread belonged wholly and solely to the
guilds-men” (p. 365).

It is characteristic of our petty bourgeois that he here
recommends to his fellow-philistines, in place of competition, an
institution like public bakeries, which existed in many places under
the guild-system and which were put an end to by the cheaper
competitive mode of production. That is to say, he recommends an

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:) Here again he does not
take into consideration that the “overcharging” and “defrauding” of the workers in
the modern world is due to their lack of property and that the lack of property directly
contradicts the assertions which Sancho attributes to the liberal bourgeoisie [...] the
liberal bourgeoisie who claim to give property to everyone by parcelling out landed
property.

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institution of a local nature, which could only persist under narrowly
restricted conditions and was inevitably bound to perish with the rise
of competition, which abolished local narrowness. He has not even
learned from competition that the “need” of bread, for example,
differs -from day to day, that it does not at all depend on him whether
tomorrow bread will still be “his business” or whether others will still
regard his need as their business, and that within the framework of
competition the price of bread is determined by the costs of
production and not by the whim of the bakers. He ignores all those
relations which were brought about by competition: the abolition of
local narrowness, the establishment of means of communication,
highly developed division of labour, world intercourse, the pro-
letariat, machinery, etc., and regretfully looks back to medieval
philistinism. All he knows about competition is that it is “contention,
rivalry and attempts to outstrip one another”; he is not concerned
about its connection with division of labour, the relation between
supply and demand, etc.* That the bourgeois, whenever their
interests demanded it (and they are better judges of this than Saint
Sancho), always “came to an understanding” insofar as this was
possible in the framework of competition and private property, is
proved by the joint-stock companies, which came into being with the
rise of sea-borne trade and manufacture and took possession of all
the branches of industry and commerce accessible to them. Such
“agreements”, which led among other things to the conquest of an
empire in the East Indies,107 are of course a small matter compared
with the well-meaning fantasy about public bakeries, which is worthy
of being discussed in the Vossische Zeitung.

As for the proletarians, they — at any rate in the modern
form — first arose out of competition; they have already repeatedly
set up collective enterprises which, however, always perished because
they were unable to compete with the “contending” private bakers,
butchers, etc., and because for proletarians — owing to the frequent
opposition of interests among them arising out of the division of
labour — no other “agreement” is possible than a political one

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] At the outset they
could have “come to an understanding”. That an “understanding” (to use this word
with its moral connotations) is only made possible by competition and that because of
the antagonistic class interests there can be no question of all people “coming to an
understanding”, as Sancho suggests, hardly troubles our sage. These German
philosophers generally believe that their own petty parochial misery is of world-
historical importance, while as regards the most far-reaching historical relations they
imagine it was only for want of their wisdom that matters were not settled by
“agreement” and everything cleared up. Sancho’s example shows how far one can get
with such fantasies.

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directed against the whole present system. Where the development
of competition enables the proletarians to “come to an understand-
ing”, they reach an understanding not about public bakeries but
about quite different matters.* The lack of “agreement” between
competing individuals that Sancho notes here entirely corresponds
to and contradicts his further exposition of competition, which we
can enjoy in the “Commentary” ( Wigand , p. 173).

“Competition was introduced because it was looked upon as a blessing for all.
People came to an agreement about it, attempts were made to approach it jointly ...
people agreed about it in much the same way as on a hunting expedition all the hunters
taking part ... may find it expedient for their purpose to scatter in the forest and to
hunt ‘singly’.... True, it now turns out ... that in the case of competition not everyone
gets ... his advantage.”

“It turns out” that Sancho knows as much about hunting as he
knows about competition. He is not speaking about a battue nor
about hunting with hounds, but about hunting in the extraordinary
sense. It only remains for him to write a new history of industry and
commerce according to the above principles, and to set up a “union”
for this kind of extraordinary hunting.

In the same calm, comfortable style appropriate to a parish
magazine he speaks of the relation of competition to morality.

“Those corporeal goods which man as such” (!) “cannot maintain, we have the
right to take away from him: this is the meaning of competition, of freedom of
industry. Any of the spiritual goods that he cannot maintain devolve likewise upon us.
But sanctified goods are inviolable. Sanctified and guaranteed — by whom?... By man or
the concept, the concept of the matter under consideration.” As such sanctified goods
he cites “life”, “freedom of the person”, “religion”, “honour”, “sense of decency”,
“sense of shame”, etc. ([Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum ,] p. 325).

In the advanced countries, Stirner “has the right” to take all
these “sanctified goods”, although not from “man as such”, but
from actual men, of course, by means of and under the conditions of
competition. The great revolution of society brought about by
competition, which resolved the relations of the bourgeois to one
another and to the proletarians into purely monetary relations, and
converted all the above-named “sanctified goods” into articles of
trade, and which destroyed for the proletarians all naturally derived
and traditional relations, e.g., family and political relations, together

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] “They” should “come
to an understanding” about a public bakery. It does not, of course, concern our
Sancho that in each epoch those whom he calls “they” and “all” are themselves diverse
individuals with diverse interests, living under diverse conditions. During the whole
course of history until now individuals have always made the mistake that, from the
very outset, they did not adopt the overwise “cleverness” with which, after the events,
our German philosophers are expatiating about them.

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with their entire ideological superstructure — this mighty revolution
did not, of course, originate in Germany. Germany played only a
passive role in it; she allowed her sanctified goods to be taken from
her without even getting the current price for them. Hence our
German petty bourgeois knows only the hypocritical assertions of the
bourgeoisie about the moral limits of competition observed by the
bourgeoisie, which every day tramples underfoot the “sanctified
goods” of the proletarians, their “honour”, “sense of shame” and
“freedom of the person”, and which even deprives them of religious
instruction. These would-be “moral limits” are regarded by Sancho
as the true “meaning” of competition, and its reality is excluded
from its meaning.

Sancho sums up the results of his investigation of competition as
follows:

“Is the competition free which the state, this ruler, according to bourgeois
principles, cramps by a thousand barriers?” (p. 347).

Sancho’s “bourgeois principles” of everywhere making the “state”
the “ruler” and regarding the barriers of competition that arise from
the mode of production and intercourse as barriers by which the
“state” “cramps” competition, are here once more proclaimed with
suitable “indignation”.

“Recently” Saint Sancho has vaguely heard miscellaneous news
“from France” (cf. Wigand, p. 190), inter alia, about the objectifica-
tion of persons in competition and the difference between competi-
tion and emulation. But the “poor Berliner” has, “out of stupidity,
spoilt these fine things” ( Wigand , ibid., where it is his guilty
conscience that speaks). “Thus, for example, he says” on page 346 of
“the book”:

“Is free competition actually free? Indeed, is it real competition, i.e., competition
of persons, as it gives itself out to be, because it bases its right on this title?”

Madame Competition gives herself out to be something, because
she (i.e., some lawyers, politicians and petty-bourgeois dreamers,
trailing in the tail of her suite) bases her right on this title. With this
allegory Sancho begins to adapt the “fine things” “from France” to
suit the Berlin meridian. We shall skip the absurd assertion already
dealt with above that “the state has no objection to make against me
personally” and thus allows me to compete, but does not give me the
“thing” (p. 347), and we shall pass straight on to his proof that
competition is not at all a competition of persons.

“But is it persons who actually compete? No, it is again only things ! In the first
place — money, etc. There is always one who lags behind the other in the contest. But it
makes a difference whether the means that are lacking can be gained through personal

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

power or can only be obtained by grace, as a gift, and moreover by the poorer, for
instance, being forced to leave, i.e., to present, his wealth to the richer" (p. 348).

As for the gift theory, we shall “spare him”3 ( Wigand , p. 190).
Let him look up the chapter on “contract” in any textbook of law and
find out whether a “gift” he is “forced to present” is still a gift. In
this way, Stirner “presents” us with our criticism of his book, for he
“is forced to leave, i.e., to present”, it to us.

The fact that of two competitors whose “things” are equal one
ruins the other, does not exist for Sancho. That workers compete
among themselves, although they possess no “things” (in Stirner’s
sense) is also a fact that does not exist for him. By doing away with
the competition of workers among themselves, he is fulfilling one of
the most pious wishes of our “true socialists”, whose deepest thanks
he is sure to receive. So it is “only things” and not “persons” that
compete. Only weapons fight, not the people who use them, and who
have learned to wield them. The people are only there to be shot
dead. This is how the competitive struggle is reflected in the minds
of petty-bourgeois school-masters who, faced with modern stock
exchange barons and cotton-lords, b console themselves with the
thought that they only lack the “things” in order to bring their
“personal power” to bear against them. This narrow-minded idea
appears still more comic if one looks a little more closely at the
“things”, instead of restricting oneself to the commonest and most
popular, e.g., “money” (which, however, is not so popular as it
seems). These “things” include, among others: that the competitor
lives in a country and town, where he enjoys the same advantages as
the competitors whom he encounters; that relations between town
and countryside have reached an advanced stage of development;
that he is competing under favourable geographical, geological and
hydrographical conditions; that as a silk manufacturer he carries on
his business in Lyons, as a cotton manufacturer in Manchester, or, in
an earlier period, as a shipper in Holland; that division of labour in
his branch of industry — as in other branches totally independent of
him — has become highly developed; that the means of communica-
tion ensure him the same cheap transport as his competitors; and
that he finds in existence skilful workers and experienced overseers.
All these “things”, which are essential for competition, and in
general the ability to compete on the world market (which he does not
know and cannot know because of his theory of the state and public

3 In German, a pun on the word schenken, which means to give, to present, to make
a gift of, but which in a certain context can also mean to spare, to let off. — Ed.
b This word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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bakeries, but which, unfortunately, determines competition and the
ability to compete), are “things” that he can neither gain by
“personal power” nor “get presented” to him by “grace” of the
“state” (cf. p. 348). The Prussian state, which attempted to “present”
all this to the Seehandlung ,108 could give him the best instruction on
that subject. Sancho appears here as the royal Prussian philosopher
of the Seehandlung, by giving a detailed commentary on the illusion
of the Prussian state about its omnipotence and the illusion of the
Seehandlung about its competitive capacity. Incidentally, competition
certainly began as a “competition of persons” possessing “personal
means”. The liberation of the feudal serfs, the first condition of
competition, and the first accumulation of “things” were purely
“personal” acts. If, therefore, Sancho wishes to put the competition
of persons in the place of competition of things, it means that he
wishes to return to the beginning of competition, imagining in doing
so that by his good will and his extraordinary egoistical consciousness
he can give a different direction to the development of competition.

This great man, for whom nothing is holy and who is not
interested in the “nature of things” and the “concept of the rela-
tion”, has nevertheless in the end to declare the “nature” of the
difference between personal and material to be holy, as also the
“concept of the relation” between these two qualities, and so
renounce the role of “creator” in respect of them. The differ-
ence— regarded by him as holy — which he notes in the passage
quoted, can nevertheless be abolished without thereby committing
“the most unmitigated profanation”. Firstly he abolishes it himself
by causing material means to be acquired through personal power
and thus converts personal power into material power. He can then
calmly address others with the moral postulate that they should
adopt a personal attitude to him. In just the same way the Mexicans
could have demanded that the Spaniards should not shoot them with
rifles but attack them with their fists or, according to Saint Sancho’ s
proposal, “seize them by the throat” in order to adopt a “personal”
attitude to them.

If one person, thanks to good food, careful education and physical
exercise, has acquired well-developed bodily powers and skill, while
another, owing to inadequate and unhealthy food and consequent
poor digestion, and as the result of neglect in childhood and
over-exertion, has never been able to acquire the “things” necessary
for developing his muscles — not to mention acquiring mastery over
them — then the “personal power” of the first in relation to the
second is a purely material one. It was not “through personal power”
that he gained the “means that were lacking”; on the contrary, he

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

owes his “personal power” to the material means already existing.
Incidentally, the transformation of personal means into material
means and of material means into personal means is only an aspect
of competition and quite inseparable from it. The demand that
competition should be conducted not with material means but with
personal means amounts to the moral postulate that competition and
the relations on which it depends should have consequences other
than those inevitably arising from them.

Here is yet another, and this time the final summing-up of the
philosophy of competition:

“Competition suffers from the drawback that not everyone has the means for
competition, because these means are taken not from personality, but from chance. The
majority are without means and therefore” (Oh, Therefore!) “impecunious” (p. 349).

It has already been pointed out to him that in competition
personality itself is a matter of chance, while chance is personality.1
The “means” for competition which are independent of personality
are the conditions of production and intercourse of the persons
themselves, which within the framework of competition appear as an
independent force in relation to these persons, as means which are
accidental for them. The liberation of people from these forces
comes about, according to Sancho, by people getting out of their
heads the ideas about these forces, or rather the philosophical and
religious distortions of these ideas — whether by etymological
synonymy (“ Vermogeri ’ and “vermogen”), moral postulates (e.g., let
each one be an all-powerful ego), or by making monkey faces and by
sentimentally comic bragging against “the holy”.

We have heard the complaint made before that in present-day
bourgeois society the “ego”, especially because of the state, cannot
realise its value, i.e., cannot bring its “abilities” [ Vermogen ] into play.
Now we learn in addition that “peculiarity” does not give the “ego”
the means for competition, that “its might” is no might at all and that
it remains “impecunious”, although every object, “being itsobject, is
also its property” * It is a complete denial of egoism in agreement with
itself. But all these “drawbacks” of competition will disappear, once
“the book” has become part of the general consciousness of people.
Until then Sancho persists in his trade in thoughts, without however
achieving a “good performance” or “doing things as well as
possible”.

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The difference
between essence and appearance asserts itself here in spite of Sancho.

a See this volume, pp. 78-79. — Ed.

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377

II. Rebellion

The criticism of society brings to an end the criticism of the old,
holy world. By means of rebellion we make a leap into the new,
egoistical world.

We have already seen in “Logic”a what rebellion is in general; it is
refusa’ to respect the holy. Here, however, rebellion acquires in
addition a distinct practical character.

Revolution = hoiy rebellion.

Rebellion = egoistical or wordly revolution.

Revolution = transformation of existing conditions.

Rebellion = transformation of me.

Revolution = a political or social act.

Rebellion = my egoistical act.

Revolution = overthrow of the existing [state of affairs].

Rebellion = existence of overthrow.

Etc., etc. Page 422 et seq. The method hitherto used by people to
overthrow the world in which they found themselves had, of course,
also to be declared holy, and a “peculiar’ method of smashing the
existing world had to be asserted against it.

Revolution “consists in a transformation of the existing conditions [Zustamt’\ or
status, of the state or society; hence it is a political or social act”. “Although the
inevitable consequence” of rebellion “is a transformation of existing conditions, it is
not this transformation that is its starting-point, but people’s dissatisfaction with
themselves”. “It is an uprising of individuals, a rising without regard for the
arrangements that develop out of it. Revolution aimed at new arrangements; rebellion
leads to a position where we no longer allow others to arrange things for us, but
arrange things for ourselves. It is not a struggle against what exists, for if it prospers
what exists will collapse of itself; it is only the setting free of me from what exists. If I
abandon what exists, then it is dead and putrefies. But since my aim is not to
overthrow something that exists, but for me to rise above it, my aim and action are not
political or social, but egoistical for they are directed solelv towards me and my
peculiarity” (pp. 421, 422).

Les beaux esprits se rencontrent.c That which was proclaimed by the
voice crying in the wildernessd is now come about. The impious John
the Baptist “Stirner” has found his holy Messiah in the shape of “Dr.
Kuhlmann from Holstein” . Listen:

“You should not tear down or destroy what stands in your way, but avoid it and
abandon it. And when you have avoided and abandoned it, it will disappear of itself,
for it will no longer find sustenance” ( Das Reich des Geistes,c etc., Genf, 1845. p. 1 16).

a See this volume, p. 300. — Ed.
b Zustand — state of affairs, conditions. — Ed.
c Noble minds think alike. — Ed.
d Mark 1:3.— Ed.

e Georg Kuhlmann. Die Neue Welt oder das Reich des Geistes auf Erden. — Ed.

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The difference between revolution and Stirner’s rebellion is not,
as Stirner thinks, that the one is a political and social act whereas the
other is an egoistical act, but that the former is an act whereas the
latter is no act at all. The whole senselessness of the antithesis that
Stirner puts forward is evident at once from the fact that he speaks of
“the Revolution” as a juridical person, which has to fight against
“ what exists ”, another juridical person. If Saint Sancho had studied
the various actual revolutions and revolutionary attempts perhaps he
might even have found in them the forms of which he had a vague
inkling when he created his ideological “rebellion”; he might have
found them, for example, among the Corsicans, Irish, Russian serfs,
and in general among uncivilised peoples. If, moreover, he had
concerned himself with the actual individuals “existing” in every
revolution, and with their relations, instead of being satisfied with
the pure ego and “what exists ”, i.e., substance (a phrase the
overthrow of which requires no revolution, but merely a knight-
errant like Saint Bruno), then perhaps he would have come to
understand that every revolution, and its results, was determined by
these relations, by needs, and that the “political or social act” was in
no way in contradiction to the “egoistical act”.

The depth of Saint Sancho’s insight into “revolution” is shown in
his statement:

“Although the consequence of rebellion is a transformation of existing conditions,
[...] this transformation is not its starting-point.”

This implies, by way of antithesis, that the starting-point of the
revolution is “a transformation of existing conditions”, i.e., that
revolution originates in revolution. “The starting-point” of rebel-
lion, on the other hand, is “people’s dissatisfaction with themselves”.
This “dissatisfaction with oneself” fits admirably with the earlier
phrases about peculiarity and the “egoist in agreement with
himself”, who is always able to go “his own way”, who is always
delighted with himself and who at every instant is what he can be.
Dissatisfaction with oneself is either dissatisfaction with oneself
within the framework of a definite condition which determines the
whole personality, e.g., dissatisfaction with oneself as a worker, or it
is moral dissatisfaction. In the first case, therefore, it is simultaneous-
ly and mainly dissatisfaction with the existing relations; in the
second case — an ideological expression of these relations them-
selves, which does not at all go beyond them, but belongs wholly to
them. The first case, as Sancho believes, leads to revolution; for
rebellion there remains, therefore, only the second case — moral
dissatisfaction with oneself. “What exists” is, as we know, “the holy”;

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hence, “dissatisfaction with oneself” reduces itself to moral dissatis-
faction with oneself as a holy one, i.e., one who believes in the holy,
in what exists. It could only occur to a discontented school-master to
base his arguments about revolution and rebellion on satisfaction
and dissatisfaction, moods that belong wholly to the petty-bourgeois
circle from which, as we continually find, Saint Sancho derives his
inspiration.

We already know what meaning “going beyond the framework of
what exists” has. It is the old fancy that the state collapses of itself as
soon as all its members leave it and that money loses its validity if all
the workers refuse to accept it. Even in a hypothetical form, this
proposition reveals all the fantasy and impotence of pious desire. It is
the old illusion that changing existing relations depends only on
the good will of people, and that existing relations are ideas. The
alteration of consciousness divorced from actual relations — a
pursuit followed by philosophers as a profession, i.e., as a
business — is itself a product of existing relations and inseparable
from them. This imaginary rising above the world is the ideological
expression of the impotence of philosophers in face of the world.
Practical life every day gives the lie to their ideological bragging.

In anv event, Sancho did not “rebel” against his own state of
confusion when he wrote those lines. For him there is the “trans-
formation of existing conditions” on one side, and “people”on the
other side, and the two sides are entirely separate from each other.
Sancho does not give the slightest thought to the fact that the
“conditions” have always been the conditions of these people and it
w ould never have been possible to transform them unless the people
transformed themselves and, if it has to be expressed in this way,
unless they became “dissatisfied with themselves” in the old
conditions. He thinks he is dealing a mortal blow at revolution when
he asserts that it aims at new arrangements, whereas rebellion leads
to a position where we no longer allow others to
arrange things for us, but arrange things for ourselves. But the
very fact that “we” arrange things for “ourselves”, that it is “we”
who rebel, denotes Mat the individual, despite all Sancho’s
“repugnance”, has to “ illow” that “we” “arrange things” for him,
and that therefore tht only difference between revolution and
rebellion is that in the iormer this is known, whereas in the latter
people harbour illusions about it. Next Sancho leaves it open
whether the rebellion “ prospers ” or not. One cannot understand why
it should not “prosper”, and even less why it should prosper, since
each rebel goes his own way. Worldly conditions would have to
intervene to show the rebels the necessity of a joint act, one which

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

would be “political or social”, irrespective of whether it arises from
egoistical motives or not. A further “trashy distinction”, based again
on confusion, is that drawn by Sancho between the “overthrow” of
what exists and “rising” above it, as though in overthrowing what
exists he does not rise above it, and in rising above it, he does not
overthrow it, if only insofar as it exists in him himself. Incidentally,
neither “overthrow” by itself nor “rising” by itself tells us anything;
that “rising” also takes place in revolution Sancho could have seen
from the fact that “ Levons-nousF''09 was a well-known slogan in the
French Revolution.

“Revolution bids” (!) “us to create institutions, rebellion urges us to rise or rise
up.* Revolutionary minds were occupied with the choice of a constitution, and the
entire political period teems with constitutional struggles and constitutional questions,
just as socially-gifted persons revealed extraordinary inventiveness as regards social
institutions (phalansteries and such-like). To be without a constitution is the endeavour
of the rebel” (p. 422).

That the French Revolution brought institutions in its train is a
fact; that Empdmng is derived from the word empor0 is also a fact; that
during the revolution and after it people fought for constitutions is
another fact, and equally so that various social systems were outlined;
and it is no less a fact that Proudhon spoke about anarchy. From
these five facts Sancho has concocted the above-quoted passage.

From the fact that the French Revolution led to “institutions”,
Sancho concludes that this is a “bidding” of revolution in general.
From the fact that the political revolution was a political one in which
the social transformation had also an official expression in the form
of constitutional struggles, Sancho — faithfully following his history-
brokerc — deduces that in it people fought over the best constitution.
To this discovery he links, by means of the words “just as”, a
mention of social systems. In the epoch of the bourgeoisie, people
occupied themselves with constitutional questions, “just as” in recent
times various social systems have been devised. This is the train of
thought in the above-quoted passage.

It follows from what was said above against Feuerbach that pre-
vious revolutions within the framework of division of labour were
bound to lead to new political institutions; it likewise follows that the
communist revolution, which removes the division of labour,
ultimately abolishes political institutions'1; and, finally, it follows also

a Stirner uses three words which have a common root: Einrichtung — arrange-
ment, institution — and the synonyms sich aufrichten and emporrichten — to stand
up, to raise oneself, to rise. — Ed.

b Emporung — rising, rebellion; empor — up, upwards. — Ed.
c An allusion to Bruno Bauer. — Ed.
d See this volume, p. 53. — Ed.

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that the communist revolution will be guided not by the “social
institutions of inventive socially-gifted persons”, but by the produc-
tive forces.

But “to be without a constitution is the endeavour of the rebel”!
He who is “born free”, who is from the outset rid of everything,
endeavours at the end of time to get rid of the constitution.

It should be mentioned also that all sorts of earlier illusions of our
bonhomme contributed to Sancho’s concept of “rebellion”. They
include, among others, his belief that the individuals who make a
revolution are linked by some ideal bond and that their “raising the
standard of revolt” is limited to inscribing on it a new concept, fixed
idea, spectre, or apparition — the holy. Sancho makes them get this
ideal bond out of their heads, whereby in his imagination they
become a disorderly mob which can now only “rebel”. In addition,
he has heard that competition is a war of all against all,a and this
proposition, mixed with his desanctified revolution, constitutes the
main factor of his “rebellion”.

“When, for the sake of clarity, I try to think of a comparison, there comes to my
mind, against my expectation, the foundation of Christianity” (p. 423). “Christ”, we
learn here, “was not a revolutionary but a rebel who rose. Therefore, he was concerned
about one thing alone : ‘be ye wise as serpents’” (ibid.).

In order to suit the “expectation” and the “alone” of Sancho the
second half of the biblical text quoted (Matthew 10:16) “and
harmless as doves” ought not to exist. Christ has to figure here for
the second time as a historical person in order to play the same role
as the Mongols and Negroes played above. Whether Christ is meant
to clarify the rebellion or the rebellion to clarify Christ is not known.
The Christian-German gullibility of our saint is concentrated in the
statement that Christ “drained the sources of life of the entire
heathen world, and without them" (this ought to read: without him )
“the existing state was anyway bound to wither” (p. 424). A withered
flower of pulpit eloquence! See above on the “ancients”. For the rest,
credo nt intelligam? or, in order to find a “comparison for the sake of
clarity”.

Countless examples have already shown us that everywhere
nothing but sacred history comes into our saint’s mind and, indeed, in
precisely those passages where the reader “has not expected” it.
“Against expectation” it occurs to him again even in the “Commen-
tary”, where Sancho on page 154 makes the “Judaic reviewers” in

a Thomas Hobbes, Elementa philosophica. De cive [Praefatio ad lectores]. — Ed.
b I believe in order to understand. The expression belongs to the medieval
scholastic Anselm of Canterbury. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

ancient Jerusalem exclaim in opposition to the Christian definition
“God is love”: “Thus you see that it is heathen God that is
proclaimed by the Christians; for if God is love, then he is the God
Amor, the God of love!” — “Against expectation”, however, the New
Testament was written in Greek, and the “Christian definition”
reads: 6 Deoc dyaicrj sa-rtv a (1 John 4 : 16), whereas “the God Amor,
the God of love” is called ’'Epux;. Sancho has, therefore, still to
explain how it is that the “Judaic reviewers” were able to achieve the
transformation of into epox;, In this passage of the

“Commentary”, Christ — again “for the sake of clarity” — is com-
pared with Sancho, and at any rate it must be admitted that they have
a striking resemblance to each other, both are “corpulent beings”
and the joyful heir at least believes in the existence, or the
uniqueness, of both of them. Sancho is the modern Christ, at this
“fixed idea” of his the whole historical construction is “aimed”.

The philosophy of rebellion, which has just been presented to us
in the form of bad antitheses and withered flowers of eloquence, is
in the final analysis only a boastful apology for the parvenu system
(parvenu, Emporkommling, Emporgekommener, Emporerh). Every rebel
in his “egoistical act” is faced by a particular existing realitv, over
which he endeavours to rise, without regard to the general
conditions. He strives to get rid of the existing world only insofar as it
is a fetter, for the rest, he endeavours, on the contrary, to
appropriate it. The weaver who “rises” to become a factory-owner
thereby gets rid of his loom and abandons it; for the rest, the world
goes on as before and our “prosperous” rebel offers to others only
the hypocritical moral demand that they should become parvenus
like himself.* Thus, all Stirner’s belligerent rodomontades end in
moral deductions from Gellert’s fables and speculative interpreta-
tions of middle-class wretchedness.

So far we have seen that rebellion is anything you like, except
action. On page 342 we learn that

“the procedure of seizure is not contemptible, but expresses the pure action of the egoist
in agreement with himself".

This should surely read: of egoists in agreement with one another,
since otherwise seizure amounts to the uncivilised “procedure” of

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] These are the
traditional moral principles of the petty bourgeois, who believes that the world will be
set to rights, if everyone by himself tries to get as far as possible and for the rest does
not trouble his head about the course of the world.

a God is love. — Ed.

b A pun on Stirner’s synonymy: Emporkommling (upstart), Emporgekommener
(one who has raised himself up), and Emporer (rebel). — Ed.

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383

thieves or to the civilised “procedure” of the bourgeois, and in the
first case does not prosper, while in the second case it is not
“rebellion”. It is to be noted that corresponding to the egoist in
agreement with himself, who does nothing, we have here the “pure”
act, certainly the only act which could be expected from such an
inactive individual.

We learn by the way what created the plebs, and we can be sure in
advance that it was created by a “dogma”, and faith in that dogma, in
the holy, a faith which here for a change appears as consciousness of
sin:

“Seizure is a sin, a crime — this is the dogma that alone creates a plebs ... the old
consciousness of sin alone is to blame” (p. 342).

The belief that consciousness is to blame for everything is his
dogma, which makes him a rebel and the plebs a sinner.

In contrast to this consciousness of sin, the egoist incites himself,
respectively the plebs, to seizure as follows:

“I tell myself: where my power extends, that is my property, and I claim as my
property everything that I feel strong enough to reach,” etc. (p. 340).

Thus, Saint Sancho tells himself that he wants to tell himself
something, calls on himself to have what he has, and formulates his
real relation as a relation of power — a paraphrase which in general is
the secret of all his rodomontades. (See “Logic”.3) Then he — who at
each instant is what he can be, and therefore has what he can
have — distinguishes his realised, actual property, which he has in his
capital account, from his possible property, his unrealised “feeling of
strength”, which he enters in his profit and loss account. This is a
contribution to the science of book-keeping of property in the
extraordinary sense.

The meaning of his solemn “telling” was revealed by Sancho in a
passage already quoted:

“7 tell myself ... then that is, properly speaking, empty talk.”

Sancho continues:

“Egoism” says “to the propertyless plebs” in order to “exterminate” it: “Seize and
take what you need!” (p. 341).

How “empty” this “talk” is can be seen at once from the following
example:

“I as little regard the wealth of the banker as something alien, as Napoleon did the
lands of the kings. We” (“I” is suddenly transformed into “we”) “are not at all
afraid to conquer this wealth, and we also seek the means to do so. Thus, we divest it of
its alien character which we were afraid of” (p. 369).

a This volume, p. 300. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

How little Sancho has “divested” the wealth of the banker of its
“alien character” he proves at once by his well-meaning advice to the
plebs to “conquer” it by seizure. “Let him seize and see what is left in
his hands!” Not the wealth of the banker but useless paper, the
“corpse” of that wealth which is no more wealth than “a dead dog is
a dog”. The wealth of the banker is wealth only in the framework of
the existing relations of production and intercourse and can be
“conquered” only in the conditions of these relations and with the
means which are valid for them. And if Sancho were to turn to some
other wealth, he would find that the prospect was no better. Thus,
the “pure act of the egoist in agreement with himself” amounts in
the final analysis to an extremely impure misunderstanding. “That is
where one can get with the spectre” of the holy.

Having told himself what he wanted to tell himself, Sancho makes
the rebellious plebs say what he has prompted it to say. The fact is
that in case of a rebellion he has drawn up a proclamation together
with instructions as to its use, which should be posted up in all village
ale-houses and distributed throughout the countryside. The procla-
mation claims a place in Der hinkende Botte110 and in the Duchy of
Nassau’s country almanac. For the time being Sancho’s tendances
incendiaires are limited to the countryside, to propaganda among
agricultural labourers and dairy maids, not touching the towns,
which is a further proof of the extent to which he has “divested”
large-scale industry of its “alien character”. Nevertheless we should
like here to give as detailed an account as possible of this valuable
document, which ought not to be lost, in order “to contribute to the
spread of a well-deserved fame insofar as it lies in our power”
(Wigand, p. 191).

The proclamation is printed on page 358 et seq. [of “the book”]
and begins as follows:

“But what is it due to that your property is safe, you privileged ones?... It is due to
the fact that we refrain from attacking, consequently, it is due to our protection.... It is
due to the fact that you use force against us.”

First it is due to the fact that we refrain from attacking, i.e., to the
fact that we use force against ourselves, and then to the fact that you
use force against us. Cela va a merveille! Let us continue.

“If you desire our respect, then buy it at a price acceptable to us.... We only want
good value.”

First the “rebels” want to sell their respect at an “acceptable price”
and then they make “good value” the criterion of the price. First an
arbitrary price, then a price determined independently of arbitrari-
ness by commercial laws, by the costs of production and the relation
between supply and demand.

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385

“We agree to leave you your property provided you properly compensate this
leaving.... You will shout about force if we help ourselves.... without force we shall not
get them” (i.e., the oysters that the privileged enjoy).... “We intend taking nothing
from you, nothing at all.”

First we “leave” it to you, then we take it away from you and have
to use “force”, and finally we prefer taking nothing from you after
all. We leave it to you in the event of your giving it up yourself; in a
moment of enlightenment, the only one we have, we see that this
“leaving” amounts to “helping oneself” and use of “force”, but in
the end we cannot be reproached with “taking” anything from you.
And there the matter must rest.

“We toil for twelve hours in the sweat of our brows and you offer us a few pence
for it. In that case you should take an equal amount for your work too.... No equality at
all!”

The “rebellious” agricultural labourers reveal themselves as true
Stirnerian “creations”.

“You do not like that? You imagine that our work is more than adequately paid
with those wages, but that yours, on the other hand, deserves a wage of several
thousand. But if you did not put such a high value on your work and allowed us to
realise a better value for ours, we would, if need be, achieve something more
important than you do for many thousand taler, and if you received only such wages
as ours, you would soon become more diligent in order to earn more. If you were to
do something that appears to us to be ten and a hundred times more valuable than our
own work, ah” (ah, you good and faithful servant!3) “then you should get a hundred
times more for it; we, for our part, are also thinking of making you things for which
you will pay us more than the usual daily wage.”

First the rebels complain that they are paid too little for their work.
At the end, however, they promise that only if they receive a higher
daily wage, they will perform work for which it will be worth paying
“more than the usual daily wage”. Further, they believe they would
achieve extraordinary things if only they were to receive better
wages, although at the same time they expect extraordinary
achievements from the capitalist only if his “wage” is reduced to the
level of theirs. Finally, after having performed the economic feat of
transforming profit — this necessary form of capital, without which
they would perish together with the capitalist — into wages, they
perform the miracle of paying “a hundred times more” than they
receive for “their own work”, i.e., a hundred times more than they
earn. “This is the meaning” of the above phrase, if Stirner “means
what he says”. But if this is only a stylistic error on his part, if the
rebels intend jointly to offer the capitalist a hundred times more

a Matthew 25:21. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

than each of them earns, then Stirner is only making them offer the
capitalist what each capitalist already has nowadays. For it is clear
that the work of the capitalist, in combination with his capital, is
worth ten or a hundred times more than that of a single person who
is merely a worker. Hence in this case, as always, Sancho leaves
everything as it was before.

“We shall get on with one another if only we agree that no one any longer needs to
present anything to someone else. Then we shall presumably go as far as to pay a decent
price even to cripples, the sick and the aged, to prevent them from dying of hunger
and want, for if we wish them to live it is fitting that we should pay for the fulfilment of
our desire. I say pay for, hence I do not mean any miserable alms.”

This sentimental episode about cripples, etc., is intended to prove
that Sancho’s rebellious agricultural labourers have already “risen”
to those heights of middle-class consciousness where they do not wish
to present anything or be presented with anything, and where they
consider that the dignity and interests of the two parties in a relation
are assured as soon as this relation is turned into a purchase.

This thunderous proclamation of the people who, in Sancho’s
imagination, are in rebellion, is followed by directions for its use in
the form oi a dialogue between a landowner and his labourers, the
master this time behaving like Szeliga and the labourers like Stirner.
In these directions the English strikes and the French workers’
coalitions are interpreted a priori in the Berlin manner.

Spokesman of the labourers: “What have you got?”

Landowner: “I have an estate of 1,000 morgen.”3

Spokesman: “And I am your labourer, and henceforth I will only cultivate your
land for a wage of a taler a day.”.

Landowner: “In that case I shall hire someone else.”

Spokesman: “You won’t find anyone, for we labourers will not work in future on
any other conditions, and if you find anyone who agrees to take less, let him beware of
us. Even a servant-girl now demands as much, and you will no longer find anyone for
a lower wage.”

Landowner: “Oh! Then I shall be ruined!”

Labourers (in chorus): “Don’t be in such a hurry! You are sure to get as much as we
get. And if not, we’ll deduct sufficient for you to live like us. — We are not talking of
equality!”

Landowner: “But I am accustomed to better living!”

Labourers: “We have nothing against that, but that’s not our concern; if you can
save more, all right. Do we have to hire ourselves out at a reduced price so that you can
live well?”

Landowner: “But you uneducated people do not need so much!”

Labourers: “Well, we shall take a little more so as to be able to get the education
that we may, perhaps, need.”

Landowner: “But if you ruin the rich, who will support the arts and sciences?”

a An old Germanic land measure of varying size in different parts of the country.
The Prussian morgen for example was 0.63 acre. — Ed.

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Labourers: “Well, our numbers must see to that. We’ll all contribute, it will make a
good round sum. Anyway, you wealthy people now buy only the trashiest books and
pictures of tearful madonnas or a pair of nimble dancer’s legs.’’

Landowner: “Oh, miserable equality!”

Labourers: “No, dear worthy master, we are not talking of equality! We only want
to be appraised according to our worth, and if you are worth more, then after all you
will also be appraised more highly. We only want good value and intend to show
ourselves worth the price you will pay.”

At the end of this dramatic masterpiece Sancho admits that, of
course, “unanimity of the labourers” will be “required”. How this
will come about we are not told. What we do learn is that the
agricultural labourers have no intention of changing in any way the
existing relations of production and intercourse, but merely want to
force the landowner to yield them the amount by which his
expenditure exceeds theirs. It is a matter of indifference to our
well-meaning bonhomme that this excess of expenditure, if distrib-
uted over the mass of the proletarians, would give each of them a
mere trifle and not improve his position in the slightest. The stage of
development of agriculture to which these heroic labourers belong
becomes evident immediately after the conclusion of the drama,
when they are transformed into “domestic servants”. They are
living, therefore, under patriarchal conditions in which division of
labour is still very little developed, and in which, incidentally, the
whole conspiracy “will reach its final goal” by the landowner taking
the spokesman into a barn and giving him a thrashing, whereas in
more civilised countries the capitalist ends the matter by closing his
enterprise for a time and letting his workers go and “play”. Sancho’s
highly practical way of constructing his work of art, his strict
adherence to the limits of probability, is evident not only from his
peculiar idea of arranging a turn-out3 of agricultural labourers, but
especially from his coalition of “servant-girls”. And how complacent
to imagine that the price of corn on the world market will depend on
the wage demands of these agricultural labourers from Further
Pomerania and not on the relation between supply and demand! A
real sensation is caused by the surprising discourse of the labourers
about literature, the latest art exhibition and the fashionable dancer
of the day, surprising even after the unexpected question of the
landowner about art and science. They become quite friendly as soon
as they touch on this literary subject and for a moment the harassed
landowner even forgets his threatened ruin in order to demonstrate
his devoument to art and science. Finally the rebels give him an
assurance of their upright character and make the reassuring

a Here and below the word is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

statement that they are guided neither by vexatious interests nor
subversive tendencies, but by the highest moral motives. All they ask
is price according to worth and they promise on their honour and
conscience to be worthy of the higher price. All this has the sole aim
of ensuring for each his own, his honest and fair earnings, “honestly
earned pleasure”. That this price depends on the state of the
labour-market, and not on the moral rebellion of a few literary-
minded agricultural labourers, is, of course, a fact which our worthy
folk could not be expected to know.

These rebels from Further Pomerania are so modest that despite
their “unanimity”, which gives them the power to do something very
different, they prefer to remain servants with the “wage of a taler a
day” as their highest desire. It is quite consistent, therefore, that they
do not cross-examine the landowner, who is in their power, but he
cross-examines them.

The “firm spirit” and “strong self-consciousness of the domestic
servant” find expression also in the “firm”, “strong” language in
which he and his comrades speak. “Perhaps — well — our numbers
must see to that — a good round sum — dear worthy master — after
all.” Previously we read in the proclamation: “If need be — ah — we
are thinking of making — perhaps, maybe, etc.” One would think that
the agricultural labourers had also mounted the wonderful steed
Clavileno.*

Our Sancho’s whole noisy “rebellion”, therefore, reduces itself in
the final analysis to a turn-out, but a turn-out in the extraordinary
sense, viz., a turn-out on Berlin lines. Whereas in civilised countries
the real turn-out plays a smaller and smaller role in the labour
movement, because the more widespread association of workers
leads to other forms of action, Sancho tries to depict the petty-
bourgeois caricature of a turn-out as the ultimate and highest form
of the world-historic struggle.

The waves of rebellion now cast us on the shore of the promised
land, flowing with milk and honey,3 where every true Israelite sits
beneath his fig-tree and where the millennium of “agreement” has
dawned.

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] France produces
relatively more than Further Pomerania. According to Michel Chevalier [Cours
d’Economie politique fait au College de France], the entire annual product of France
uniformly distributed among its population amounts to 97 francs a head, this means
per family....

Exodus 3 : 8. — Ed.

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III. Union

In the section on rebellion we first of all collected examples of
Sancho’s bragging, and then traced the practical course of the “pure
act of the egoist in agreement with himself”. With regard to
“union”, we shall do the opposite: we shall first of all examine the
actual institutions and then compare them with the illusions of our
saint about them.

1. Landed Property

“If we no longer wish to leave the land to the landed proprietors, but want to
appropriate it for ourselves, then we unite to this end and form a union, societe”
(society), “ which makes itself the owner; if we are successful, the landed proprietors cease
to be such.” The “land” will then be the “property of the conquerors.... And the
attitude to the land of these individuals collectively will be no less arbitrary than that of
an isolated individual or so-called proprietaire. Hence, in this case too, property
continues to exist, and indeed even as ‘ exclusive ’ property, since mankind, that great
society, excludes the individual from its property, leasing to him, perhaps, only a part
of it, as a reward.... So it remains and so it will come to be. That in which all want to
have a share will be taken away from the individual who wants to have it for himself
alone and turned into common property. Since it is common property each has his share in it
and this share is his property. Thus in our old conditions, a house belonging to five
heirs is likewise their common property; one-fifth part of the income, however, is the
property of each of them” (pp. 329, 330).

After our brave rebels have formed a union, a society, and in this
form have won a portion of land for themselves, this “societe”, this
juridical person, “makes itself ” the “proprietor” . To avoid any
misunderstanding, he adds at once that “this society excludes the
individual from the property, leasing to him, perhaps, only a part of
it, as a reward”. In this way Saint Sancho appropriates for himself
and his “union” his notion of communism. The reader will recall
that Sancho in his ignorance reproached the communists for wanting
to make society the supreme owner that gives each individual his
“property” in feudal tenure.

Further, Sancho offers his recruits the prospect of a “share in the
common property”. On a later occasion, this same Sancho says, again
against the communists:

“Whether wealth belongs to the whole community, which allows me a portion of it,
or to separate owners, for me the compulsion is the same, since in both cases I am
powerless to decide about it”

(for this reason, too, his “collective” “takes away” from him what it
does not want him to have in his exclusive possession, and so makes
him feel the power of the collective will).

Thirdly, we here again encounter the “exclusiveness” with which
he has often reproached bourgeois property, so that “even the
miserable spot on which he stands does not belong to him”. On the

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contrary, he has only the right and power to squat on it as a miserable
and oppressed corvee peasant.

Fourthly, Sancho here appropriates the feudal system which, to his
great annoyance, he has discovered in all hitherto existing or pro-
posed forms of society. The “society” of conquerors behaves much
as did the “unions” of semi-barbarian Germans who conquered
the Roman provinces and introduced there a crude feudal system
which was still strongly alloyed with the old tribal mode of life.
It gives every individual a piece of land “as a reward”. At the stage
where Sancho and the sixth-century Germans are, the feudal system
still coincides in many respects with the system of “reward”.

It goes without saying, incidentally, that the tribal property which
Sancho here restores afresh to honour would be bound before long
to be dissolved again in the conditions now existing. Sancho feels this
himself, for he exclaims: “So it remains and” (a beautiful “and”!) “so
it will come to be ”, and finally, he proves — by his great example of the
house belonging to five heirs — that he has not the slightest intention
of going outside the framework of our old relations. His whole plan
for the organisation of landed property has only the aim of leading
us by a historical detour back to petty-bourgeois hereditary tenure
and the family property of German imperial towns.

Of our old relations, i.e., those now existing, Sancho has
appropriated only the legal nonsense that individuals, or prop-
rietaires , behave “arbitrarily” in relation to landed property. In the
“union”, this imagined “arbitrariness” is to be continued by
“society”. To the “union” it is so much a matter of indifference what
happens to the land that “perhaps” “society” leases plots of land to
individuals, or perhaps not. All that is quite immaterial.

Sancho, of course, cannot know that a definite structure of
agriculture is linked to a definite form of activity and determined by
a definite stage of the division of labour. But anyone else can see how
little the small corvee peasants, as proposed here by Sancho, are in a
position where “each of them can become an omnipotent ego”, and
how little their ownership of a miserable plot of land resembles the
greatly praised “ownership of everything”. In the real world, the
intercourse of individuals depends on their mode of production, and
therefore Sancho’s “perhaps” completely overthrows — perhaps — his
whole union. But “perhaps”, or rather undoubtedly, there emerges
here Sancho’s real view concerning intercourse in the union, namely,
the view that the basis of egoistical intercourse is the holy.

Sancho brings to light here the first “institution” of his future
union. The rebels who strove to be “without a constitution”, “ar-
range things for themselves”, by “choosing” for themselves a

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“constitution” of landed property. We see that Sancho was right in
not placing any brilliant hopes in new “institutions”. At the same
time, however, we see that he ranks highly among the “socially-
gifted persons” and is “extraordinarily inventive in regard to social
institutions”.

2. Organisation of Labour

“The organisation of labour concerns only such work as can be done for us by
others, such as cattle-slaughtering, ploughing, etc.; other work remains egoistical
because, for example, no one can compose your music for you, complete the sketches
for your pointings, etc. No one can do Raphael's works for him. These are works ol a
unique individual which only this unique person is capable of producing, whereas the
former work deserves to be called human" (on page 356 this is made identical witt,
“ generally useful"), “since peculiarity is of little consequence here and almost ever y
person can be trained to do it’’ (p. 355).

“It is always expedient for us to come to an agreement about human labour, in
order that it should not claim all our time and effort, as is the case under
competition.... For whom, however, should time be gained? For what purpose does a
human being need more time than is required to restore his exhausted labour-power?
To this communism gives no reply. For what purpose? In order to enjoy himself as the
unique, having done his share as a human being” (pp. 356, 357).

“Through work I can fulfil the official duties of a president, minister, etc.; these
posts require onlv a general education, namely, the education that is generally
accessible.... Although, however, anyone could occupy these posts, it is only the unique
power of the individual, peculiar to him alone, that gives them, as it were, life and
significance. For performing his duties not as an ordinary man would do, but by
exerting the power of his uniqueness, he does not get paid, if he is paid only as an
official or minister. If he has acted to your satisfaction and you wish for your benefit to
retain this power of the unique person, which is worthy of gratitude, then you ought
to pay hirn not simply as a man who performs a merely human task, but as one who
accomplishes something unique” (pp. 362, 363).

“If you are in a position to afford jov to thousands of people, then thousands will
remunerate you for it; for it is in your power not to do it and therefore they have to
pay you for the fact that you do it” (p. 351).

“One cannot establish any general rate of payment for my uniqueness, as can be
done for work I perform as a man. Only for the latter can a tariff be fixed. Therefore
you may fix a general tariff for human work, but do not deprive your uniqueness or
what is due to it” (p. 363).

As an example of the organisation of labour in the union, the
public bakeries already mentioned are cited on page 365. Under the
conditions of vandal parcellation presupposed above, these public
institutions must be a real miracle.

First of all human labour must be organised and thereby
shortened so that Brother Straubinger,111 having finished his work
early, can “enjoy himself as the unique” (p. 357), but on page 363
the “enjoyment” of the unique one is reduced to his extra earnings.
On page 363 it is stated that the vital activity of the unique person

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

does not have to take place subsequently to human labour; the latter
can be performed as unique labour, and in that case it requires an
additional wage. Otherwise the unique one, who is interested not in
his uniqueness but in a higher wage, could shelve his uniqueness and
to spite society be satisfied with acting as an ordinary person, at the
same time playing a trick on himself.

According to page 356, human labour coincides with generally
useful labour, but according to pages 351 and 363 unique labour
shows its worth by being paid for additionally as generally useful or,
at least, useful to many people.

Thus, the organisation of labour in the union consists in the
separation of human labour from unique labour, in the establish-
ment of a tariff for the former and in haggling for an additional
wage for the latter. This addition is again twofold, one part being for
the unique performance of human labour and the other for the
unique performance of unique labour. The resulting book-keeping is
the more complicated because what was unique labour yesterday
(e.g., spinning cotton thread No. 200) becomes human labour today,
and because the unique performance of human labour requires a
continual moucharderie a upon oneself in one’s own interest and
universal moucharderie in the public interest. Hence this whole great
organisational plan amounts to a wholly petty-bourgeois appropria-
tion of the law of supply and demand, which exists at present and has
been expounded by all economists. The law which determines the
price of those types of labour that Sancho declares unique (e.g., that
of a dancer, a prominent physician or lawyer), he could have found
already explained by Adam Smith, b and a tariff fixed for it by the
American Cooper.c Modern economists explain on the basis of this
law the high payment for what they call travail improductif and the
low wages of the agricultural day-labourer, and in general all
inequalities in wages. Thus, with God’s help, we have again arrived at
competition, but a competition which has so much come down in the
world that Sancho can propose a fixed rate, the establishment of
wages by law, as was the case of old in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.

It deserves mention also that the idea which Sancho puts forward
here is also to be found as something completely new in the Herr
Messiah — Dr. Georg kuhlmann of Holstein.d

* Spying .— Ed.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations. — Ed.

c Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy. — Ed.

d Georg Kuhlmann, Die Neue Welt oder das Reich des Geistes auf Erden. — Ed.

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What Sancho here calls human labour is, apart from his
bureaucratic fantasies, the same thing as is usually meant by machine
labour, labour which, as industry develops, devolves more and more
on machines. True, because of the above-described organisation of
landownership, machines are an impossibility in the “union” and
therefore the corvee peasants in agreement with themselves prefer
to reach an agreement with one another about this work. As regards
“presidents” and “ministers”, Sancho — this poor localised being,3 as
Owen puts it — forms his opinion only by his immediate environ-
ment.

Here, as always, Sancho is again unlucky with his practical
examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music for vou,
complete the sketches for your paintings. No one can do Raphael’s
works for him”. Sancho could surely have known, however, that it
was not Mozart himself, but someone else who composed the greater
part of Mozart’s Requiem and finished it,112 and that Raphael himself
“completed” only an insignificant part of his own frescoes.

He imagines that the so-called organisers of labour113 wanted to
organise the entire activity of each individual, and yet it is precisely
they who distinguish between directly productive labour, which has
to be organised, and labour which is not directly productive. In
regard to the latter, however, it was not their view, as Sancho
imagines, that each should do the work of Raphael, but that anyone
in whom there is a potential Raphael should be able to develop
without hindrance. Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his
pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome
at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci
and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art
depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred
under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended
on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later
period, depended on the totally different development of Venice.
Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical
advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and
the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of
labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse.
Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his
talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the
division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting
from it.

This phrase is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

In proclaiming the uniqueness of work in science and art, Stirner
adopts a position far inferior to that of the bourgeoisie. At the
present time it has already been found necessary to organise this
“unique” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint
even a tenth of his pictures if he regarded them as works which “only
this unique person is capable of producing”. In Paris, the great
demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organisation
of work for their production; this organisation at any rate yields
something better than its “unique” competitors in Germany. In
astronomy, people like Arago, Herschel, Encke and Bessel consid-
ered it necessary to organise joint observations and only after that
obtained some moderately good results. In historical science, it is
absolutely impossible for the “unique” to achieve anything at all,
and in this field, too, the French long ago surpassed all other nations
thanks to organisation of labour. Incidentally, it is self-evident that
all these organisations based on modern division of labour still lead
to extremely limited results, and they represent a step forward only
compared with the previous narrow isolation.

Moreover, it must be specially emphasised that Sancho confuses
the organisation of labour with communism and is even surprised
that “communism” gives him no reply to his doubts about this
organisation. Just like a Gascon village lad is surprised that
Arago cannot tell him on which star God Almighty has built his
throne.

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular
individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up
with this, is a consequence of division of labour. Even if in certain
social conditions, everyone were an excellent painter, that would by
no means exclude the possibility of each of them being also an
original painter, so that here too the difference between “human”
and “unique” labour amounts to sheer nonsense. In any case, with a
communist organisation of society, there disappears the subordina-
tion of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises
entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the
individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter,
sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of his
professional development and his dependence on division of labour.
In a communist society there are no painters but only people who
engage in painting among other activities.

Sancho’s organisation of labour shows clearly how much all these
philosophical knights of “substance” content themselves with mere
phrases. The subordination of “substance” to the “subject” about
which they all talk so grandiloquently, the reduction of “substance”

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which governs the “subject” to a mere “accident” of this subject, is
revealed to be mere “empty talk”.* Hence they wisely refrain from
examining division of labour, material production and material
intercourse, which in fact make individuals subordinate to definite
relations and modes of activity. For them it is in general only a
matter of finding new phrases for interpreting the existing
world- — phrases which are the more certain to consist only of comical
boasting, the more these people imagine they have risen above the
world and the more they put themselves in opposition to it. Sancho is
a lamentable example of this.

3. Money

“Money is a commodity and indeed an essential means or faculty, for it protects
wealth against ossification, keeps it fluid and effects its circulation. If you know of a
better means of exchange, all right; but it too will be a variety of money” (p. 364).

On page 353 money is defined as “marketable property or
property in circulation”.

Thus the “union” retains money, this purely social property
which has been stripped of all individuality. The extent to which
Sancho is in the grip of the bourgeois outlook is shown by his
question about a better means of exchange. Consequently, he first of
all assumes that a means of exchange is necessary, and moreover he
knows of no other means of exchange except money. The fact that
ships and railways, which serve to transport commodities, are also
means of exchange does not concern him. Hence in order to speak
iiot merely of means of exchange, but particularly of money, he has
to include the other attributes of money; that it is a means of
exchange that is universally marketable and in circulation, that it
keeps all property fluid, etc. These bring in also economic aspects
which Sancho does not know but which actually constitute money;
and with them the whole present situation, class economy, domina-
tion of the bourgeoisie, etc.

First of all, however, we learn something about the — extremely
odd — course of monetary crises in the union.

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] If Sancho had taken his
phrases seriously he would have had to analyse the division of labour. But he wisely
refrained from doing this and unhesitatingly accepted the existing division of labour
in order to exploit it for his “union”. A closer examination of the subject would, of
course, have shown him that the division of labour is not abolished by “getting it out of
one’s head”. The fight of the philosophers against “substance” and their utter
disregard of the division of labour, the material basis which has given rise to the
phantom of substance, merely prove that for these heroes it is a matter only of
abolishing phrases and by no means of changing the conditions from which these
phrases were bound to arise.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

The question arises:

“Where is money to be obtained?... People pay not with money, of which there may
be a shortage, but with their ability [ Vermogerf ], thanks to which alone we are wealthy
[ vermogendl .... It is not money that harms you, but your inability [Unvermogen] to
obtain it.”

Now comes the moral exhortation:

“Let your ability [ Vermogen ] have its effect, brace yourself, and you will not lack
money [Geld], your money, money of your coining.... Know then that you have as
much money as you have power; for the extent to which you can assert yourself
[Dir Geltung verschaffst] determines how much you are worth [ giltst ] ” (pp. 353,
364).

The power of money, the fact that the universal means of
exchange becomes independent in relation both to society and to
individuals, reveals most clearly that the relations of production
and intercourse as a whole assume an independent existence.
Consequently, Sancho as usual knows nothing about the connection
of money relations with production in general and intercourse. As a
good citizen, he unhesitatingly keeps money in force; indeed it could
not be otherwise with his view of division of labour and the
organisation of landed ownership. The material power of money,
which is strikingly revealed in monetary crises and which, in the form
of a permanent scarcity of money, oppresses the petty bourgeois who
is “inclined to make purchases”, is likewise a highly unpleasant fact
for the egoist in agreement with himself. He gets rid of the difficulty
by reversing the ordinary idea of the petty bourgeois, thus making it
appear that the attitude of individuals to the power of money is
something that depends solely on their personal willing or run-
ning.114 This fortunate turn of thought then gives him the chance of
reading a moral lecture, buttressed by synonymy, etymology and
vowel mutation, to the astounded petty bourgeois already disheart-
ened by lack of money, thus debarring in advance all inconvenient
questions about the causes of the pecuniary embarrassment.

The monetary crisis consists primarily in the fact that all “wealth”
[ Vermogen ] suddenly becomes depreciated in relation to the means of
exchange and loses its “power” [ Vermogen ] over money. A crisis is in
existence precisely when one can no longer pay with one’s “wealth”
[Vermogen], but must pay with money. And this again does not
happen because of a shortage of money, as is imagined by the petty
bourgeois who judges the crisis by his personal difficulties, but

a A play on the word Vermogen — ability, faculty, power, wealth, means,
property — and its derivatives. — Ed.

b A play on the words Geld — money; sich Geltung verschaffen — to assert
oneself; and gelten — to be worth. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

397

because the specific difference becomes fixed between money as the
universal commodity, the “marketable property and property in
circulation”, and all the other, particular commodities, which
suddenly cease to be marketable property. It cannot be expected
that, to please Sancho, we shall analyse here the causes of this
phenomenon. Sancho first of all consoles the moneyless and hopeless
small shopkeepers by saying that it is not money that causes the
scarcity of money and the whole crisis, but their inability to obtain it.
It is not arsenic that is to blame for someone dying who takes it, it is
the inability of his organism to digest it.

After first defining money as an essential and indeed specific form
of wealth [ Vermogen ], as the universal means of exchange, money in
the ordinary sense, Sancho suddenly turns the thing round when he
sees the difficulties this would lead to and declares all ability
[ Vermogen ] to be money, in order to create the appearance of
personal power. The difficulty during a crisis is precisely that “all
wealth” [ Vermogen ] has ceased to be “money”. Incidentally, this
amounts to the practice of the bourgeois who accepts “all wealth” as
means of payment so long as it is money, and who only begins to raise
difficulties when it becomes difficult to turn this “wealth” into
money, in which case he also ceases to regard it as “wealth”. Further,
the difficulty in time of crisis is precisely that you, petty bourgeois,
whom Sancho addresses here, can no longer put into circulation the
money of your coining, your bills of exchange; but you are expected
to pay with money not coined by you and which shows no evidence
that it has passed through your hands.

Finally, Stirner distorts the bourgeois motto “You are worth as
much as the money you possess” into “You have as much money as
you are worth”, which alters nothing, but only introduces an
appearance of personal power and thus expresses the trivial
bourgeois illusion that everyone is himself to blame if he has no
money. Thus Sancho disposes of the classic bourgeois saying:
L’argent n’a pas de maitref and can now mount the pulpit and exclaim:
“Let your ability have its effect, brace yourself, and you will not lack
money.” Je ne connais pas de lieu a la bourse oil se fasse le transfert des
bonnes intentions. b He had but to add: Obtain credit; knowledge is
powerc; it is harder to earn the first taler than the last million; be
moderate and save your money and, most important of all, do not
multiply overmuch, etc. — to reveal not one ass’s ear, but both at once.

a Money has no master. — Ed.

I do not know a place at the stock exchange where people trade in good
intentions. — Ed.

‘ This phrase is in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

In general, the man for whom everyone is what he can be and does
what he can do, ends all chapters with moral exhortations.

The monetary system in Stirner’s union is, therefore, the existing
monetary system expressed in the euphemistic and gushingly-
sentimental manner of the German petty bourgeois.

After Sancho has paraded in this way with the ears of his ass, Don
Quixote-Szeliga draws himself up to his full height and delivers a
solemn speech about the modern knight-errant, in the course of
which money is transformed into Dulcineadel Toboso and the
manufacturers and commergants en masse into knights, namely, into
chevaliers d’industrie. The speech has also the subsidiary aim of
proving that because money is an “essential means”, it is also
“essentially a daughter”.* And he stretched out his right hand and
said:

“On money depends fortune and misfortune. In the bourgeois period it is a force
because like a maiden” (a dairymaid; per appositionem Dulcinea) “it is only wooed but is
not indissolubly joined in marriage to anvone. All the romance and chivalry of wooing
a dear object is revived in competition. Monev, an object of ardent desire, is abducted
by the bold chevaliers d’industrie” (p. 364).

Sancho has now arrived at a profound explanation why money in
the bourgeois epoch is a power, namely, because in the first place
fortune and misfortune depends on it and, secondly, because it is a
maiden. He has further learned why he can lose his money, namely,
because a maiden is not indissolubly joined in marriage to anyone.
Now the poor wretch knows where he stands.

Szeliga, who has thus made the burgher into a knight, now in the
following way makes the communist into a burgher and indeed into a
burgher husband.

“He on whom fortune smiles leads the bride home. The ragamuffin is fortunate,
he takes her into his household, society, and destroys the maiden. In his home she is no
longer a bride, but a wife, and her maiden name disappears with her maidenhood. As
a housewife, the money-maiden is called labour, for labour is the name of the husband.
She is the property of the husband.

“To complete the picture, the child of labour and money is again a girl” (“essential-
ly a daughter”), “an unmarried girl” (has Szeliga ever known of a girl coming
“married” out of the maternal womb?) “and therefore money” (according to the
above proof that all money is an “unmarried girl”, it is self-evident that “all unmar-
ried girls” are “money”) — “therefore money, but having its definite descent from
labour, its father” ( toute recherche de la paternite est interditeh). “The shape of the face,
the image, bears a different stamp” (pp. 364, 365).

* Cf. Die heilige Familie, p. 266.a

a See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 167. — Ed.

Any investigation regarding paternity is forbidden — the formula used in article
340 of the Code Napoleon (the French civil code). — Ed.

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399

This story of marriage, burial and baptism is surely of itself
sufficient proof that it is “essentially a daughter” of Szeliga, and
indeed a daughter of “definite descent”. Its ultimate basis, however,
lies in the ignorance of his former stableman, Sancho. This is clearly
seen at the end, when the orator is again anxiously concerned about
the “coining” of money, thereby betraying that he still considers that
coins are the most important medium of circulation. If he had taken
the trouble to examine a little more closely the economic relations of
money, instead of weaving a beautiful, leafy bridal wreath for it,a he
would have known that — without mentioning state securities, shares,
etc. — the major part of the medium of circulation consists of bills of
exchange, whereas paper money forms a comparatively small part,
and coin a still smaller part. In England, for example, fifteen times as
much money circulates in the form of bills of exchange and
bank-notes as in the form of coin. And even as regards coin, it is
determined exclusively by the costs of production, i.e., labour. Hence
Stirner’s elaborate process of procreation was superfluous here.

Szeliga’s solemn reflections about a means of exchange based on
labour but, nevertheless, different from the money of today, which
he claims to have discovered among certain communists, only prove
once again the simplicity with which our noble couple believe
everything they read without even examining it.

When the two heroes ride homewards after this “knightly and
romantic” campaign of “wooing”, they are bringing back no
“fortune”, still less the “bride”, and least of all “money”, but at best
one “ragamuffin” is bringing home the other.

4. State

We have seen that Sancho retains in his “union” the existing
form of landownership, division of labour and money, in the way in
which a petty bourgeois conceives these relations in his imagination.
It is clear at a glance that with such premises Sancho cannot do
without the state.

First of all his newly acquired property will have to assume the
form of guaranteed, legal property. We have already heard his
words:

“That in which all want to have a share will be taken away from the individual who
wants to have it for himself alone” (p. 330).

a Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischiitz, (Libretto by Friedrich Kind), Act III,
Scene 4, “Wedding Song”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Here, therefore, the will of the whole community is enforced
against the will of the separate individual. Since each of the egoists in
agreement with themselves may turn out to be not in agreement with
the other egoists and thus become involved in this contradiction, the
collective will must also find some means of expression in relation to
the separate individuals —

“and this will is called the will of the state" (p. 257).

Its decisions are then legal decisions. The enforcement of this
collective will in its turn requires repressive measures and public
power.

“In this matter also” (in the matter of property) “the unions will multiply the
means of the individual and safeguard his disputed property” (they guarantee,
therefore, guaranteed property, i.e., legal property, i.e., property that Sancho
possesses not “unconditionally”, but “holds on feudal tenure” from the “union”)
(p. 342).

Obviously, the whole of civil law is re-established along with the
relations of property, and Sancho himself, for example, sets forth
the theory of contract fully in the spirit of the lawyers, as follows:

“It is of no importance, too, that I deprive myself of one or other freedom, for
example, through any contract ” (p. 409).

And in order to “safeguard” “disputed” contracts, it will also “be
of no importance” if he has again to submit himself to a court and to
all the actual consequences of a civil court case.

Thus, “little by little out of the twilight and the night” we come
closer again to the existing relations, but only as these relations exist
in the dwarfish imagination of the German petty bourgeois.

Sancho admits:

“In relation to freedom there is no essential difference between state and union
The latter cannot arise and exist without restricting freedom in various ways just as
the state is incompatible with boundless freedom. Restriction of freedom is always
unavoidable, for it is impossible to get rid of everything; one cannot fly like a bird just
because one would like to fly, etc.... In the union there will still be a fair amount of
compulsion and lack of freedom, for its aim is not freedom which, on the contrary, it
sacrifices for the sake of peculiarity, but only for the sake of peculiarity’ (pp. 410, 41 1).

Leaving aside for the time being the strange distinction between
freedom and peculiarity, it should be noted that Sancho, without
intending to do so, has already sacrificed his “peculiarity” in his
union owing to its economic institutions. As a true “believer in
the state”, he sees a restriction only where political institutions begin.
He lets the old society continue in existence and with it also the
subordination of individuals to division of labour; in which case he

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401

cannot escape the fate of having a special “peculiarity” prescribed
for him by the division of labour and the occupation and position in
life that falls to his lot as a result of it. If, for example, it fell to his lot
to work as an apprentice fitter in Willenhall,115 then the “peculiarity”
imposed on him would consist in a twisted hip-bone resulting in a
“game leg”; if the “title spectre3 of his book”116 has to exist as a
female throstle spinner, then her “peculiarity” would consist in stiff
knees. Even if our Sancho continues his old vocation of a corvee
peasant, already assigned to him by Cervantes, and which he now
declares to be his own vocation, which he calls upon himself to fulfil,
then, owing to division of labour and the separation of town and
countryside, he will have the “peculiarity” of being a purely local
animal cut off from all world intercourse and, consequently, from all
culture.

Thus, in the union, owing to its social organisation, Sancho
malgre lui loses his peculiarity if, by way of exception, we take
peculiarity in the sense of individuality. That owing to its political
organisation, he then surrenders his freedom as well is quite
consistent and only shows still more clearly how much he strives to
retain the present state of affairs in his union.

Thus, the essential distinction between freedom and peculiarity
constitutes the difference between the present state of affairs and the
“union”. We have already seen how essential this distinction is.
The majority of the members of the union, too, will possibly not
be particularly embarrassed by this distinction and will hasten to
decree their “riddance” from it, and if Sancho is not satisfied with
that, they will show him on the basis of his own “book” that, firstly,
there are no essences, but that essences and essential differences are
“the holy”; secondly, that the union does not have to trouble
about the “nature of the matter” and the ‘concept of the relation”;
and, thirdly, that they in no way encroach on his peculiarity but only
on his freedom to express it. They will perhaps prove to him, if it is
his “endeavour to be without a constitution”, that they restrict only
his freedom by putting him in prison, striking blows at him, or
tearing off his leg, and that he remains partout et toujours “peculiar”,
so long as he is still able to show the signs of life of a polyp, an oyster
or even a galvanised dead frog. They will “set a definite price” on his
work, as we have already heard, and “will not allow a truly free” (!)
“realisation of his property”, for thereby they restrict only his
freedom, not his peculiarity. These are things for which Sancho, on
page 338, reproaches the state. “What then should” our corvee

a Marie Dahnhardt, Stirner’s wife. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

peasant Sancho “do? He should be firm and pay no attention” to the
union (ibid.). Finally, whenever he begins to grumble about the
restrictions imposed on him, the majority will suggest that so long as
he has the peculiarity of declaring that freedoms are peculiarities,
they can take the liberty of regarding his peculiarities as freedoms.

Just as the difference mentioned above between human and
unique labour was only a miserable appropriation of the law of
supply and demand, so now the difference between freedom and
peculiarity is a miserable appropriation of the relation between the
state and civil society or, as Monsieur Guizot says, between liberte
individuelle and pouvoir public. This is so much the case that in what
follows he can copy Rousseau3 almost word for word.

“The agreement [...] according to which everyone must sacrifice a part of his
freedom” occurs “not at a’> ior the sake of something universal or even for the sake of
another person”, on the contrary, “I only concluded it out of self-interest. As far as
sacrificing is concerned, after all 1 merely sacrifice what is not in my power, i. e., I
sacrifice nothing at all” (p. 418).

Our corvee peasant in agreement with himself shares this quality
with all other corvee peasants and, in general, with every individual
who has ever lived on the earth. Compare also Godwin, Political
Justice .b

Incidentally, Sancho appears to possess the peculiarity of imagin-
ing that according to Rousseau individuals concluded the contract
for the sake of the universal, which never entered Rousseau’s head.

One consolation, however, remains for him.

“The state is holy ... the union, however, is ... not holy.” And herein lies the “great
difference between the state and the union” (n. 411).

The whole difference, therefore, amounts to this, that the
“union” is the actual modern state, and the “state” is Stirner’s
illusion about the Prussian state, which he confuses with the state in
general.

5. Rebellion

Sancho quite rightly has so little faith in his subtle distinctions
between state and union, holy and not holy, human and unique,
peculiarity and freedom, etc., that in the end he takes refuge in the
ultima ratio of the egoist in agreement with himself — in rebellion.
This time, however, he rebels not against himself, as he earlier
asserted, but against the union. Just as earlier Sancho sought to
achieve clarity on all points in the union, so he does here, too, as
regards rebellion.

a Du Contrat social ; ou, Principes du droit politique. — Ed.

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on Morals
and Happiness. — Ed.

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403

“If the community treats me unjustly, I rebel against it and defend my property"
(p. 343).

If the rebellion does not “prosper”, the union will “expel (imprison, exile, etc.)
him” (pp. 256, 257).

Sancho here tries to appropriate the droits de Vhomme of 1793,
which included the right of insurrection 117 — a human right that, of
course, bears bitter fruits for him who tries to make use of it at his
“own” discretion.

Thus Sancho’s whole union amounts to the following. Whereas in
his previous criticism he regarded existing relations only from the
aspect of illusion, when speaking of the union he tries to get to know
the actual content of these relations and to oppose this content to the
former illusions. In this attempt, our ignorant school-master was of
course bound to fail ignominiously. By way of exception, he did once
endeavour to appropriate the “nature of the matter” and the
“concept of the relation”, but he failed to “divest” any matter or any
relation of its “alien character”.

Now that we have become acquainted with the union in its real
form, it only remains for us to examine Sancho’s enthusiastic ideas
about it, i.e., the religion and philosophy of the union.

6. Religion and Philosophy of the Union

Here we again start from the point at which, above, we began the
description of the union. Sancho employs two categories: property
and wealth; the illusions about property correspond mainly to the
positive data given on landed property, the illusions about wealth to
the data on the organisation of labour and the monetary system in
the union.

A. Property

Page 331: “The world belongs to me.”

Interpretation of his hereditary tenure of a plot of land.

Page 343: “I am the owner of everything that I need”,

a euphemistic way of saying that his needs are his possession and that
what he needs as a corvee peasant is determined by his cir-
cumstances. In the same way the economists maintain that the
worker is the owner of everything that he needs as a worker. See the
discourse on the minimum wage in Ricardo. a

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. — Ed.

404

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Page 343: “Now, however, everything belongs to me.”

A musical flourish in honour of his rate of wages, his plot of land,
his permanent lack of money, and his expulsion from everything
that the “society” does not want him to have in exclusive possession.
The same idea occurs on page 327, expressed thus:

“His” (i. e., of another person) “possessions are mine and I dispose of them as the
owner to the extent of my power.”

This pompous allegro marciale passes in the following way into a
gentle cadence, in which it gradually collapses on its backside —
Sancho’s usual fate:

Page 331: “The world belongs to me. Do you” (communists) “say anything
different with your opposite thesis: the world belongs to all ? All are I, and once more
I, etc.” (for example, “Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on”).

Page 415: “I am I and you are I, but ... this I, in which we are all equal, is only my
thought [...] a generality” (the holy).

The practical variation on this theme occurs on page 330, where
the “individuals collectively” (i.e., all) are counterposed as a
regulating force to the “isolated individual” (i.e., the I as distinct
from all).

These dissonances are at last resolved in the soothing final chord,
to the effect that what I do not possess is at any rate the property of
another “ego”. Thus, “ownership of everything” is only an
interpretation of the statement that each person possesses exclusive
property.

Page 336: “But propertv is only my property if I have unconditional possession of
it. As the unconditional ego, I have property, I carry on free trade.”

We already know that only freedom, and not peculiarity, is
affected if freedom of trade and unconditionality are not respected
in the union. “Unconditional property” is a fitting supplement to the
“secure”, guaranteed property in the union.

Page 342: “In the opinion of the communists, the community should be the
owner. On the contrary, 1 am the owner and only come to an agreement with others
about my property.”

On page 329 we saw how “the societe makes itself the owner ” and
on page 330 how it “excludes individuals from its property”. In
general, we saw that the tribal system of feudal tenure, the crudest
beginnings of the system of feudal tenure, was introduced.
According to page 416, the “feudal system = absence of property”;
hence, according to the same page, “property is recognised in
the union, and only in the union”, and moreover for a conclusive

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

405

reason: “because no one any longer holds his possession in feudal
tenure from any being [ Wesen ]” (ibid.). That is to say, under the
hitherto existing feudal system, the feudal lord was this “being”, in
the union it is the societe. From this one may at least conclude that
Sancho possesses an “exclusive” but by no means “secure” property
in the “essence” [ Weser ia] of past history.

In connection with page 330, according to which each individual is
excluded from that which society does not consider it right for him to
hold in his sole possession, and in connection with the state and legai
system of the union, it is stated:

Page 369: “The rightful and legitimate property of another will only be that which
you consider it right to recognise as his property. If you no longer consider it right, it
loses its rightfulness for you and you will deride any claim to absolute right in it.”

He thus proves the astounding fact that what is right in the
union does not have to be right for him — an indisputable right
of man. If there exists in the union the institution of the old French
parliaments, which Sancho loves so much, then he can even have his
dislike recorded and deposit the document in the office of the law
courts, consoling himself with the thought that “one cannot get rid
of everything”.

These various statements appear to contradict themselves, one
another and the actual state of things in the union. But the key
to this riddle is to be found in the juridical fiction, already
mentioned, that when Sancho is excluded from the property of
others, he is merely coming to an agreement with these others. This
fiction is expounded in more detail in the following statements:

Page 369: “This” (i. e., respect for the property of others) “comes to an end when I
can leave the tree in question to another, just as I leave my stick, etc., to another, but
do not from the outset regard it as something alien, i. e., holy. Rather ... it remains my
property, no matter for what period I cede it to another; it is mine and remains mine.
I see nothing alien in the wealth belonging to the banker.”

Page 328: “I do not retreat timidly before thv and your property, but always regard
it as my property, which I do not need to respect at all. Just do the same with what you
call my property. With this point of view we shall most easily reach agreement with one
another.”

If, according to the rules of the union, Sancho is “given a
drubbing” as soon as he tries to seize another’s property, he will, of
course, maintain that pilfering is a “peculiarity” of his; nevertheless,
the union will decide that Sancho has merely taken a “liberty”. And
if Sancho takes the “liberty” of attempting to seize another’s
possessions, the union has the “peculiarity” of sentencing him to a
flogging for it.

A pun on the word Wesen, which can mean “being” or “essence”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick- Engels

The essence of the matter is this. Bourgeois and, particularly,
petty-bourgeois and small-peasant property is, as we have seen,
retained in the union. Merely the interpretation, the “ point of view” , is
different, for which reason Sancho always lays stress on the way of
“regarding”. “Agreement” is reached when this new philosophy of
regarding enjoys the regard of the whole union. This philosophy
consists of the following. Firstly, every relation, whether caused by
economic conditions or direct compulsion, is regarded as a relation
of “agreement”. Secondly, it is imagined that all property belonging
to others is relinquished to them by us and remains with them only
until we have the power to take it from them; and if we never get the
power, tant mieux. Thirdly, Sancho and his union in theory
guarantee each other absence of respect, whereas in practice the
union “reaches agreement” with Sancho with the aid of a stick.
Finally, this “agreement” is a mere phrase, since everyone knows
that the others enter into it only with the secret reservation that they
will reject it on the first convenient occasion. I see in your property
something that is not yours but mine; since every ego does likewise,
they see in it the universal, by which we arrive at the modern-German
philosophical interpretation of ordinary, special and exclusive
private property.

The union’s philosophy of property includes, inter alia, the
following fancies derived from Sancho’s system:

On page 342, that property can be acquired in the union through
absence of respect; on page 351, that “we are all in the midst of
abundance”, and ! “have only to help myself to as much as I can”,
whereas in actual fact the whole union belongs to Pharaoh’s seven
lean kine ; and finally that Sancho “cherishes thoughts” which are
“written in his book” and which are sung on page 374 in the
incomparable ode addressed to himself imitating Heine’s three odes
to SchlegeP: “ You, who cherishes such thoughts as are written in your
book ... you cherish nonsense!” Such is the hymn which for the time
being Sancho addresses to himself, and about which the union will
later “reach agreement” with him.

Finally, it is obvious even without reaching “agreement” that
property in the extraordinary sense, about which we already spoke in
the “ Phenomenology ”,b is accepted in the union in lieu of payment,
as “marketable” property and “property in circulation”. Concerning
simple facts, e.g., that I feel sympathy, that I talk to others, that my

a Heine’s “Sonettenkranz an A. W. von Schlegel” in his Buch der Lieder. — Ed.
b See this volume, pp. 259-60. — Ed.

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407

leg is amputated (or torn off), the union will reach agreement that
“the feeling experienced by sentient beings is also mine, my
property” (p. 387); that other people’s ears and tongues are likewise
my property, and that mechanical relations too are my property.
Thus, appropriation in the union will consist chiefly in all relations
being transformed into property relations by means of a facile
paraphrase. This new mode of expressing “evils” that are already
now rife is an “essential means or faculty” in the union and will
successfully make up for the deficit in the means of existence that is
inevitable in view of Sancho’s “social gifts”.

B. Wealth

Page 216: “Let each of you become an omnipotent ego!”

Page 353: “Think about increasing your wealth!”

Page 420: “Keep up the value of your gifts;

“Keep up their price,

“Do not allow yourself to be compelled to sell below the price,

“Do not allow yourself to be persuaded that your commodity is not worth the price,
“Do not make yourself ridiculous by a ridiculously low price,

“Follow the example of the courageous man’,’ etc.!

Page 420: “Increase the value of your property!”

“Increase your value!”

These moral sayings, which Sancho learned from an Andalusian
Jewish huckster who drew up rules of life and trade for his son, and
which Sancho now pulls out of his knapsack, form the main wealth of
the union. The basis of all these statements is the great proposition
on page 351:

“Everything that you are able to do [ vermagst — inflected form of vermogen ] is
your wealth [ Vermogen ].”

This proposition is either meaningless, i. e., mere tautology, or is
nonsense. It is tautology if it means: what you are able to do, you are
able to do. It is nonsense if Vermogen No. 2 is meant to denote
wealth “in the ordinary sense”, commercial wealth, and if the
proposition is based, therefore, on the etymological similarity. The
collision consists precisely in the fact that what is expected of my
ability [Vermogen] is different from what it is capable of doing, e. g., it
is demanded of my ability to write verses that it should make money
out of these verses. My ability is expected to produce something quite
different from the specific product of this special ability, viz., a
product depending on extraneous conditions which are not subject
to my ability. This difficulty is supposed to be resolved in the
union by means of etymological synonymy. We see that our
egoistical school-master hopes to occupy an important post in the

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

union. Incidentally, this difficulty is only an apparant one. The
usual pithy moral saying of the bourgeois: “Anything is good to
make money of”a is here expounded at length in Sancho’s solemn
manner.

C. Morality, Intercourse, Theory of Exploitation

Page 352: “You behave egoisiically when you regard one another neither as
owners nor as ragamuffins or workers, but as part of your wealth, as useful creatures.
Then you will not give anything either to the owner, the proprietor, for his property,
or to the one who works, but only to him whom you can make use of. Do we need a
king? the North Americans ask themselves, and they reply: ‘He and his work are not
worth a farthing to us’.”

On the other hand, on page 229, he reproaches the “bourgeois
period” for the following:

“Instead of taking me as I am, attention is paid only to my property, my qualities,
and a marriage alliance13 is concluded with me only for the sake of what I possess. The
marriage is concluded, so to speak, with what I have and not with what I am.”

That is to say, attention is paid solely to what I am for others, to my
usefulness, I am dealt with as a useful creature. Sancho spits into the
“bourgeois period’s” soup, so that in the union he alone can
devour it.

If the individuals of modern society regard one another as owners,
as workers and, if Sancho wishes, as ragamuffins, this only means
that they treat one another as useful creatures, a fact which can only
be doubted by such a useless individual as Sancho. The capitalist,
who “regards” the worker “as a worker”, shows consideration for
him only because he needs workers; the worker treats the capitalist in
the same way, and the Americans too, in Sancho’s opinion (we would
like him to point out the source from which he took this historic fact),
have no use for a king, because he is useless to them as a worker. Sancho
has chosen his example with his usual clumsiness, for it is supposed
to prove exactly the opposite of what it actually proves.

Page 395: “For me, you are nothing but food, just as I am eaten up and consumed
by you. We stand in only one relation to one another: that of usefulness, utility, use.”

Page 416: “No one is to me a person to be held in respect, not even my fellow-man;
but, like other beings’’ (!), “he is solely an object, for which I may or may not have
sympathy, an interesting or uninteresting object, a useful or useless creature.”

The relation of “usefulness”, which is supposed to be the sole
relation of the individuals to one another in the union, is at once
paraphrased as “ eating ” one another. The “perfect Christians” of

a The words in quotes are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

b In the manuscript: ehelicher Bund, that is, “marriage alliance”; in Stirner’s
book: ehrlicher Bund, i.e., “honest alliance”. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

409

the union, of course, also celebrate holy communion, only not by
eating together but by eating one another.

The extent to which this theory of mutual exploitation, which
Bentham expounded ad nauseam, could already at the beginning of
the present century be regarded as a phase of the previous one is
shown by Hegel in his Phanomenologie. See there the chapter “The
Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition”, where the theory of
usefulness is depicted as the final result of enlightenment. The
apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of
people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical
abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all
relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract
monetary-commercial relation. This theory came to the fore with
Hobbes and Locke, at the same time as the first and second
English revolutions, those first battles by which the bourgeoisie won
political power. It is to be found even earlier, of course, among
writers on political economy, as a tacit presupposition. Political
economy is the real science of this theory of utility; it acquires its true
content among the Physiocrats, since they were the first to treat
political economy systematically. In Helvetius and Holbach one can
already find an idealisation of this doctrine, which fully corresponds
to the attitude of opposition adopted by the French bourgeoisie
before the revolution. Holbach depicts the entire activity of
individuals in their mutual intercourse, e. g., speech, love, etc., as a
relation of utility and utilisation. Hence the actual relations that are
presupposed here are speech, love, definite manifestations of
definite qualities of individuals. Now these relations are supposed
not to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and
manifestation of some third relation attributed to them, the relation
of utility or utilisation. This paraphrasing ceases to be meaningless and
arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual
not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as
disguises, though by no means disguises of the category of utilisation,
but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of
utility.

The verbal masquerade only has meaning when it is the
unconscious or deliberate expression of an actual masquerade. In
this case, the utility relation has a quite definite meaning, namely,
that I derive benefit for myself by doing harm to someone else
(exploitation de I’homme par Vhomme71)’, in this case moreover the use that

a Exploitation of man by man.” See Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere
annee. — Ed.

15*

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

I derive from some relation is entirely extraneous to this relation, as
we saw above in connection with ability [ Vermogen ] that from each
ability a product alien to it was demanded, a relation determined by
social relations3 — and this is precisely the relation of utility. All this is
actually the case with the bourgeois. For him only one relation is valid
on its own account — the relation of exploitation; all other relations
have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this
one relation; and even where he encounters relations which cannot
be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation, he subordi-
nates them to it at least in his imagination. The material expression
of this use is money which represents the value of all things, people
and social relations. Incidentally, one sees at a glance that the
category of “utilisation” is first abstracted from the actual relations
of intercourse which I have with other people (but by no means from
reflection and mere will) and then these relations are made out to be
the reality of the category that has been abstracted from them
themselves, a wholly metaphysical method of procedure. In exactly
the same way and with the same justification, Hegel depicts
all relations as relations of the objective spirit. Hence Holbach’s
theory is the historically justified philosophical illusion about the
bourgeoisie just then developing in France, whose thirst
for exploitation could still be regarded as a thirst for the full
development of individuals in conditions of intercourse freed from
the old feudal fetters. Liberation from the standpoint of the
bourgeoisie, i. e., competition, was, of course, for the eighteenth
century the only possible way of offering the individuals a new career
for freer development. The theoretical proclamation of the con-
sciousness corresponding to this bourgeois practice, of the conscious-
ness of mutual exploitation as the universal mutual relation of all
individuals, was also a bold and open step forward. It was a kind of
enlightenment which interpreted the political, patriarchal, religious
and sentimental embellishment of exploitation under feudalism
in a secular way; the embellishment corresponded to the
form of exploitation existing at that time and it had been
systematised especially by the theoretical writers of the absolute
monarchy.

Even if Sancho had done the same thing in his “book” as Helvetius
and Holbach did in the last century, the anachronism would still have
made it ridiculous. But we have seen that in the place of active
bourgeois egoism he put a bragging egoism in agreement with itself

a See this volume, pp. 407-08. — Ed.

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411

His sole service — rendered against his will and without realising
it — was that he expressed the aspirations of the German petty
bourgeois of today whose aim it is to become bourgeois. It was quite
fitting that the petty, shy and timid behaviour of these petty
bourgeois should have as its counterpart the noisy, blustering and
impertinent public boasting of “the unique” among their
philosophical representatives. It is quite in accordance with the
situation of these petty bourgeois that they do not want to know
about their theoretical loud-mouthed champion, and that he knows
nothing about them; that they are at variance with one another, and
he is forced to preach egoism in agreement with itself. Now, perhaps,
Sancho will realise the sort of umbilical cord that connects his
“union” with the Customs Union.119

The advances made by the theory of utility and exploitation, its
various phases are closely connected with the various periods of
development of the bourgeoisie. In the case of Helvetius and
Holbach, the actual content of the theory never went much beyond
paraphrasing the mode of expression of writers belonging to the
period of the absolute monarchy. It was a different method of
expression which reflected the desire to reduce all relations to the
relation of exploitation and to explain the intercourse of people
from their material needs and the ways of satisfying them, rather
than the actual realisation of this desire. The problem was set.
Hobbes and Locke had before their eyes not only the earlier
development of the Dutch bourgeoisie (both of them had lived for
some time in Holland) but also the first political actions by which the
English bourgeoisie emerged from local and provincial limitations,
as well as a comparatively highly developed stage of manufacture,
overseas trade and colonisation. This particularly applies to Locke,
who wrote during the first period of the English economy, at the
time of the rise of joint-stock companies, the Bank of England and
England’s mastery of the seas. In their case, and particularly in that
of Locke, the theory of exploitation was still directly connected with
the economic content.

Helvetius and Holbach had before them, besides English theory
and the preceding development of the Dutch and English
bourgeoisie, also the French bourgeoisie which was still struggling
for its free development. The commercial spirit, universal in the
eighteenth century, had especially in France taken possession of all
classes in the form of speculation. The financial difficulties of the
government and the resulting disputes over taxation occupied the
attention of all France even at that time. In addition, Paris in the
eighteenth century was the only world city, the only city where there

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was personal intercourse among individuals of all nations. These
premises, combined with the more universal character typical of the
French in general, gave the theory of Helvetius and Holbach its
peculiar universal colouring, but at the same time deprived it of the
positive economic content that was still to be found among the
English. The theory which for the English was still simply the
registration of facts becomes for the French a philosophical system.
This generality devoid of positive content, such as we find it in
Helvetius and Holbach, is essentially different from the substantial
comprehensive view which is first found in Bentham and Mill. The
former corresponds to the struggling, still undeveloped bourgeoisie,
the latter to the ruling, developed bourgeoisie.

The content of the theory of exploitation that was neglected by
Helvetius and Holbach was developed and systematised by the
Physiocrats — who worked at the same time as Holbach — but because
their basis was the undeveloped economic relations of France where
feudalism, under which landownership plays the chief role, was still
unshaken, they remained in thrall to the feudal outlook insofar as
they declared landownership and land cultivation to be that
[productive force] which determines the whole structure of society.

The theory of exploitation owes its further development in
England to Godwin, and especially to Bentham. As the bourgeoisie
succeeded in asserting itself more and more both in England and in
France, the economic content, which the French had neglected, was
gradually re-introduced by Bentham. Godwin’s Political Justice was
written during the terror, and Bentham’s chief works during and
after the French Revolution and the development of large-scale
industry in England. The complete union of the theory of utility with
political economy is to be found, finally, in Mill.

At an earlier period political economy had been the subject of
inquiry either by financiers, bankers and merchants, i.e., in general
by persons directly concerned with economic relations, or by persons
with an all-round education like Hobbes, Locke and Hume, for
whom it was of importance as a branch of encyclopaedic knowledge.
Thanks to the Physiocrats, political economy for the first time was
raised to the rank of a special science and has been treated as such
ever since. As a special branch of science it absorbed the other
relations — political, juridical, etc. — to such an extent that it reduced
them to economic relations. But it regarded this subordination of all
relations to itself as only one aspect of these relations, and thereby
allowed them for the rest an independent significance outside
political economy. The complete subordination of all existing
relations to the relation of utility, and its unconditional elevation to

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413

the sole content of all other relations, occurs for the first time in
Bentham’s works, where, after the French Revolution and the
development of large-scale industry, the bourgeoisie is no longer
presented as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of
existence are those of the whole society.

When the sentimental and moral paraphrases, which for the
French were the entire content of the utility theory, had been
exhausted, all that remained for its further development was the
question how individuals and relations were to be used, to be
exploited. Political economy had meanwhile already provided the
answer to this question; the only possible advance consisted in the
inclusion of the economic content. Bentham achieved this advance.
Political economy, however, had already given expression to the fact
that the chief relations of exploitation are determined by production
in general, independently of the will of individuals, who find them
already in existence. Hence, no other field of speculative thought
remained for the utility theory than the attitude of individuals to
these important relations, the private exploitation of an already
existing world by individuals. On this subject Bentham and his
school indulged in lengthy moral reflections. The whole criticism of
the existing world by the utility theory was consequently restricted
within a narrow range. Remaining within the confines of bourgeois
conditions, it could criticise only those relations which had been
handed down from a past epoch and were an obstacle to the
development of the bourgeoisie. Hence, although the utility theory
does expound the connection of all existing relations with economic
relations, it does so only in a restricted way.

From the outset the utility theory had the aspect of a theory of
general utility, yet this aspect only became fraught with meaning
when economic relations, especially division of labour and exchange,
were included. With division of labour, the private activity of the
individual becomes generally useful; Bentham’s general utility
becomes reduced to the same general utility which is asserted
in competition as a whole. By taking into account the economic
relations of rent, profit and wages, the definite relations of
exploitation of the various classes were introduced, since the manner
of exploitation depends on the social position of the exploiter. Up to
this point the theory of utility was able to base itself on definite social
facts; its further account of the manner of exploitation amounts to a
mere recital of catechism phrases.

The economic content gradually turned the utility theory into a
mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove
that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

are the most advantageous and generally useful. It has this character
among all modern economists.

But whereas the utility theory had thus at least the advantage of
indicating the connection of all existing relations with the economic
foundations of society, in Sancho the theory has lost all positive
content; it is divorced from all actual relations and is restricted to the
mere illusion cherished by the isolated bourgeois about his
“cleverness”, by means of which he reckons to exploit the world.
Incidentally, it is only in a few passages that Sancho deals with the
theory of utility even in this diluted form; almost the entire “book” is
taken up, as we have seen, with egoism in agreement with itself, i.e.,
with an illusion about this illusion of the petty bourgeois. Even these
few passages are finally reduced by Sancho to mere vapour, as we
shall see.

D. Religion

“In this community” (namely with other people) “I perceive nothing at all but a
multiplication of my power, and I retain it only for so long as it is my multiplied
power” (p. 416).

“I no longer abase myself before any power, and recognise that all powers are only
my power, which I have immediately to subdue if they threaten to become a power
against me or over me; each of them is permitted to be only one of my means for
achieving my purpose.”

I “perceive”, I “ recognise ”, I “have to subdue”, power “ is permitted to
be only one of my means”. We have already been shown in
connection with the “union” what these moral demands mean and
how far they correspond to reality. This illusion about his power is
closely connected with the other illusion: that in the union “sub-
stance” is abolished (see “Humane Liberalism”3), and that the rela-
tions of the union members never assume a rigid form in respect to
separate individuals.

“The union, the association, this eternally fluid association of everything that ex-
ists.... Of course, society can arise also from union, but only as a fixed idea arises out of a
thought.... If a union has crystallised into a society, it has ceased to be an association, for
association is the unceasing process of associating with one another; it has reached the
state of being associated, it has become society, the corpse of the union or association....
Neither a natural nor a spiritual bond holds the union together” (pp. 294, 408, 416).

As regards the “natural bond”, it exists, despite Sancho’s “ill will”,
in the form of corvee peasant economy and organisation of labour,
etc., in the union; likewise the “spiritual bond”b in Sancho’s
philosophy. For the rest we need only refer to what we have already

3 See this volume, p. 235. — -Ed.

’ Goethe, Faust, I. Teil, 2. “Studierzimmerszene”.— Ed.

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415

said several times, and repeated in connection with the union, about
division of labour causing the relations to confront individuals as
something existing independently of them.

“In short, society is holy, the union is your own; society uses you, you use the
union”, etc. [p. 418].

E. Supplement to the Union

Whereas hitherto we were shown no other possibility of reaching
the “union” than through rebellion, now we learn from the “Com-
mentary” that the “union of egoists” already exists in “hundreds of
thousands” of cases as one of the aspects of existing bourgeois society
and that it is accessible to us even without any rebellion and any
“Stirner”. Then Sancho shows us

“such unions in actual life. Faust is within such unions when he exclaims: Here I am a
human being' (!), “here I dare to be one,3 here Goethe states it even in black and white”
(“but the holy person is called Humanus, see Goethe”, bcf. “the book”).... “If Hess were
to look attentively at real life, he would see hundreds of thousands of such egoistical
unions — some of short duration, some enduring.”

Sancho then makes some “children” meet for a game in front of
Hess’ window, and makes “a few friends” take Hess to a tavern and
lets him associate with his “beloved”.

“Of course, Hess does not notice how full of significance these trivial examples are
and how infinitely different they are from the holy societies and indeed from the
fraternal, human society of holy socialists” (Sancho contra Hess, Wigand, pp. 193,
194).

In just the same way, on page 305 of “the book”, “association for
material aims and interests” is graciously accepted as a voluntary
union of egoists.

Thus the union here is reduced, on the one hand, to bourgeois as-
sociations and joint-stock companies and, on the other hand, to
bourgeois clubs, picnics, etc. That the former belong wholly to the pre-
sent epoch is well known, and that this equally applies to the latter is also
well known. Let Sancho look at the “unions” of an earlier epoch, e.g.,
of feudal times, or those of other nations, e.g., of the Italians, English,
etc., right down to the “unions” of children, in order to realise what
the difference is. By this new interpretation of the union he confirms
only his obdurate conservatism. Sancho, who incorporated the whole
of bourgeois society, insofar as he liked it, into his allegedly new in-
stitution, here by way of supplement only assures us that in his union
people will also enjoy themselves and indeed in quite the tradition-

3 Goethe, Faust, I. Teil, “Osterspaziergang”. — Ed.

b From Goethe’s unfinished poem “Die Geheimnisse” ( Humanus — a character in
this poem). — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

al way. Our bonhomme, of course, does not consider the question:
what relations existing independently of him enable — or do not en-
able— him to “accompany a few friends to a tavern”.

The idea of resolving the whole of society into voluntary groups —
which is here, on the basis of hearsay accounts current in Berlin,
turned into a Stirnerian idea — belongs to Fourier.3 But with Fourier
this view presupposes a complete transformation of society and is
based on a criticism of the existing “unions”, so much admired
by Sancho, and of their infinite tedium. Fourier describes these
present-day attempts at amusement in their connection with the
existing relations of production and intercourse, and wages a
polemic against them; Sancho, far from criticising them, wants on
the contrary to transplant them in their entirety into his new “mutual
agreement” institution for promoting happiness; he thereby only
proves once again how strongly he is held in thrall to existing
bourgeois society.

Finally, Sancho delivers the following oratio pro domo, i.e., in
defence of the “union”.

“Is a union in which the majority allow themselves to be cheated in regard to their
most natural and obvious interests, a union of egoists? Have egoists united where one is
the slave or serf of another?... Societies in which the needs of some are satisfied at the
expense of others, in which, for example, some can satisfy the need for rest by others
having to work to the point of exhaustion ... Hess... identifies ... these ‘egoistical unions’
of his with Stimer’s union of egoists” ([ Wigand ,] pp. 192, 193).

Sancho, therefore, expresses the pious wish that in his union,
based on mutual exploitation, all the members will be equally
powerful, cunning, etc., etc., so that each can exploit the others to
exactly the same extent as they exploit him, and so that no one will be
“cheated” in regard to his “most natural and obvious interests” or be
able to “satisfy his needs at the expense of others”. We note here that
Sancho recognises “natural and obvious interests” and “needs” of
all — consequently, equal interests and needs. Further, we recall at
once page 456 of the book, according to which “overreaching” is a
“moral idea inculcated by the guild spirit”, and for a man who has
had a “wise education”, it remains a “fixed idea from which no
freedom of thought can give protection”. Sancho “gets his thoughts
from above and adheres to them” (ibid.). This equal power of all
consists, according to his demand, in that everyone should become
“ omnipotent ”, i.e., all should become impotent in relation

to one another, a perfectly consistent postulate that coincides with

Charles Fourier, Theorie de I'unite universelle. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

417

the sentimental desire of the petty bourgeois for a world of
hucksters, in which everyone gets his advantage. Or, on the other
hand, our saint quite suddenly presupposes a society in which each
can satisfy his needs unhampered, without doing so “at the expense
of others”, and in that case the theory of exploitation again becomes
a meaningless paraphrase for the actual relations of individuals to
one another.

After Sancho in his “union” has “devoured” and consumed
the others, thereby transforming intercourse with the world into
intercourse with himself, he passes from this indirect self-enjoyment
to direct self-enjoyment, by consuming himself.

C. My Self-Enjoyment

The philosophy which preaches enjoyment is as old in Europe as the
Cyrenaic school.120 Just as in antiquity it was the Greeks who were the
protagonists of this philosophy, so in modern times it is the French,
and indeed for the same reason, because their temperament and
their society made them most capable of enjoyment. The philosophy
of enjoyment was never anything but the clever language of certain
social circles who had the privilege of enjoyment. Apart from the fact
that the manner and content of their enjoyment was always
determined by the whole structure of the rest of society and suffered
from all its contradictions, this philosophy became a mere phrase as
soon as it began to lay claim to a universal character and proclaimed
itself the outlook on life of society as a whole. It sank then to the level
of edifying moralising, to a sophistical palliation of existing society,
or it was transformed into its opposite, by declaring compulsory
asceticism to be enjoyment.

In modern times the philosophy of enjoyment arose with the
decline of feudalism and with the transformation of the feudal
landed nobility into the pleasure-loving and extravagant nobles of the
court under the absolute monarchy. Among these nobles this
philosophy still has largely the form of a direct, naive outlook on life
which finds expression in memoirs, poems, novels, etc. It only
becomes a real philosophy in the hands of a few writers of the
revolutionary bourgeoisie, who, on the one hand, participated in the
culture and mode of life of the court nobility and, on the other hand,
shared the more general outlook of the bourgeoisie, based on the
more general conditions of existence of this class. This philosophy
was, therefore, accepted by both classes, although from totally
different points of view. Whereas among the nobility this language
was restricted exclusively to its estate and to the conditions of life of

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

this estate, it was given a generalised character by the bourgeoisie
and addressed to every individual without distinction. The condi-
tions of life of these individuals were thus disregarded and the
theory of enjoyment thereby transformed into an insipid and
hypocritical moral doctrine. When, in the course of further
development, the nobility was overthrown and the bourgeoisie
brought into conflict with its opposite, the proletariat, the nobility
became devoutly religious, and the bourgeoisie solemnly moral and
strict in its theories, or else succumbed to the above-mentioned
hypocrisy, although the nobility in practice by no means renounced
enjoyment, while among the bourgeoisie enjoyment even assumed
an official, economic form — that of luxury *

It was only possible to discover the connection between the kinds
of enjoyment open to individuals at any particular time and the class
relations in which they live, and the conditions of production and
intercourse which give rise to these relations, the narrowness of the
hitherto existing forms of enjoyment, which were outside the actual
content of the life of people and in contradiction to it, the connection
between every philosophy of enjoyment and the enjoyment actually
present and the hypocrisy of such a philosophy which treated all indi-
viduals without distinction — it was, of course, only possible to discover

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] In the Middle Ages the
pleasures were strictly classified; each estate had its own distinct forms of pleasure and
its distinct manner of enjoyment. The nobility was the estate privileged to devote itself
exclusively to pleasure, while the separation of work and enjoyment already existed
for the bourgeoisie and pleasure was subordinated to work. The serfs, the class
destined exclusively to labour, had only extremely few and restricted pleasures, which
came their way mostly by chance, depended on the whim of their masters and other
contingencies, and are hardly worth considering.

Under the rule of the bourgeoisie the nature of the pleasures depended on the
classes of society. The pleasures of the bourgeoisie are determined by the material
brought forth by this class at various stages of its development and they have acquired
the tedious character which they still retain from the individuals and from the
continuous subordination of pleasure to money-making. The present crude form of
proletarian pleasure is due, on the one hand, to the long working hours, which led to
the utmost intensification of the need for enjoyment, and, on the other hand, to the
restriction — both qualitative and quantitative — of the means of pleasure accessible to
the proletarian.

In general, the pleasures of all hitherto existing estates and classes had to be either
childish, exhausting or crude, because they were always completely divorced from the
vital activity, the real content of the life of the individuals, and more or less reduced to
imparting an illusory content to a meaningless activity. The hitherto existing forms
of enjoyment could, of course, only be criticised when the contradiction between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat had developed to such an extent that the existing
mode of production and intercourse could be criticised as well.

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419

all this when it became possible to criticise the conditions of produc-
tion and intercourse in the hitherto existing world, i.e., when the con-
tradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had given rise
to communist and socialist views. That shattered the basis of all moral-
ity, whether the morality of asceticism or of enjoyment.

Our insipid, moralising Sancho believes, of course, as his whole
book shows, that it is merely a matter of a different morality, of
what appears to him a new outlook on life, of “getting out of one’s
head” a few “fixed ideas”, to make everyone happy and able to enjoy
life. Hence the chapter on self-enjoyment could at most reproduce
under a new label the same phrases and maxims which he had
already so frequently had the “self-enjoyment” of preaching to us.
This chapter has only one original feature, namely that he deifies and
turns into philosophical German all enjoyment, by giving it the name
“ self -enjoyment" . While the French philosophy of enjoyment of the
eighteenth century at least gave a witty description of the gay and
audacious mode of life that then existed, Sancho’s whole frivolity is
limited to such expressions as “consuming” and “squandering”, to
images such as the “light” (it should read a candle) and to
natural-scientific recollections which amount either to belletristic
nonsense such as that the plant “imbibes the air of the ether” and
that “song-birds swallow beetles”, or else to wrong statements, for
example, that a candle burns itself. On the other hand, here we again
enjoy all the solemn seriousness of the statements against “the
holy”, which, we are told, in the guise of “vocation — designa-
tion— task” and “ideal” has hitherto spoiled people’s self-enjoyment.
For the rest, without dwelling on the more or less dirty forms in which
the “self” in “self-enjoyment” can be more than a mere phrase, we
must once more as briefly as possible outline for the reader Sancho’s
machinations against the holy, with the insignificant modulations oc-
curring in this chapter.

To recapitulate briefly, “vocation, designation, task, ideal” are
either

1) the idea of the revolutionary tasks laid down for an oppressed
class by the material conditions; or

2) mere idealistic paraphrases, or also the apt conscious expres-
sion of the individuals’ modes of activity which owing to division of
labour have assumed independent existence as various professions;
or

3) the conscious expression of the necessity which at every
moment confronts individuals, classes and nations to assert their
position through some quite definite activity; or

4) the conditions of existence of the ruling class (as determined by

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the preceding development of production), ideally expressed in law,
morality, etc., to which [conditions] the ideologists of that class more
or less consciously give a sort of theoretical independence; they can
be conceived by separate individuals of that class as vocation, etc.,
and are held up as a standard of life to the individuals of the
oppressed class, partly as an embellishment or recognition of
domination, partly as a moral means for this domination. It is to be
noted here, as in general with ideologists, that they inevitably put the
thing upside-down and regard their ideology both as the creative
force and as the aim of all social relations, whereas it is only an
expression and symptom of these relations.

As for our Sancho, we know that he has the most ineradicable faith
in the illusions of these ideologists. Because people, depending on
their various conditions of life, construct various notions about
themselves, that is about man, Sancho imagines that the various ideas
created the various conditions of life and thus the wholesale
manufacturers of these ideas, i.e., the ideologists, have dominated
the world. Cf. page 433.

“Thinkers rule in the world”, “thought rules the world”; “priests or school-
masters” “stuff their heads with all sorts of trash”, “they imagine a human ideal” which
other people have to take as a guide (p. 442).

Sancho even knows exactly the conclusion by virtue of which
people were subjected to the fancies of the school-masters and owing
to their stupidity subjected themselves to these fancies:

“Because it is conceivable for me” (the school-master), “it is possible for people;
because it is possible for people, it means that they ought to be such, it was their
vocation ; and, finally, it is only according to this vocation, only as persons having a
vocation, that one must judge human beings. And the further conclusion? It is not the
individual who is man, but it is a thought, an ideal, that is man — species — mankind”
(p. 441).

All collisions in which, owing to their actual conditions of life,
human beings become involved with themselves or with others appear
to our school-master Sancho as collisions between people and their
ideas about the life of “Man”, ideas which they either have put them-
selves into their heads or have allowed school-masters to put into their
heads. If they managed to get these ideas out of their heads “how hap-
pily” “these unfortunate beings could live”, what “capers” they could
cut, whereas now they have to “dance to the pipe of the school-masters
and bear-leaders”! (p. 435). (The lowest of these “bear-leaders” is
Sancho, for it is only himself whom he leads by the nose.) If, for exam-
ple, people almost always and almost everywhere — in China as well as
in France — did not get it into their heads that they suffer from over-

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 421

population, what an overflowing abundance of the means of existence
would these “unfortunate beings” suddenly have at their disposal.

Under the pretext of writing a treatise on possibility and reality,
Sancho here once more attempts to put forward his old story of the
rule of the holy in the world. For him everything a school-master
gets into his head about me is possible, and then Sancho can easily
prove that this possibility has no reality except in his head. His
solemn assertion that “behind the word possible lay concealed the
most momentous misunderstanding of thousands of years” (p. 441)
is sufficient proof that it is impossible for him to conceal behind
words the consequences of his abundant misunderstanding of
thousands of years.

This treatise on the “coincidence of possibility and reality”
(p. 439), on what people have the ability to be and what they are, a
treatise that harmonises so well with his earlier insistent exhortations
that one should bring all one’s abilities into play, etc., leads him,
however, to a few more digressions on the materialist theory of
circumstances, which we shall presently deal with in more detail. But
first, one more example of his ideological distortion. On page 428 he
makes the question “how can one acquire life” identical with the
question how is one to “create in oneself the true ego” (or “life”).
According to the same page, “worrying about life” ceases with his
new moral philosophy and the “squandering” of life begins. Our
Solomon expresses still more “eloquently” the miraculous power of
his allegedly new moral philosophy in the following saying:

“Regard yourself as more powerful than others say you are, then you will have
more power; value yourself more and you will have more" (p. 483).

See above, in the section on the “union”, Sancho’s method of ac-
quiring property.3

Now for his theory of circumstances.

“Man has no vocation, but he has powers which manifest themselves where they exist,
because their being consists solely in their manifestation, and they cannot remain
inactive any more than life itself.... Everyone at each instant uses as much power as he
has” (“increase your value, follow the example of the courageous man, let each of you
become an omnipotent ego”, etc. — Sancho said above).... “One’s powers can indeed be
intensified and multiplied, particularly by hostile resistance or friendly support; but
where their application is missing one can be sure that they are absent. It is possible to
strike fire from a stone, but without striking it, nothing comes out; similarly man
needs an impulse. Since powers always prove to be operative of themselves, the
injunction to use them would be superfluous and senseless.... Power is merely a
simpler word for manifestation of power” (pp. 436, 437).

“Egoism in agreement with itself”, which just as it pleases brings

See this volume, pp. 403-07. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

or does not bring its powers or abilities into play and which applies
the jus utendi et abutendi a to them, here suddenly and unexpectedly
comes to grief. Once they are present, the forces here all of a sudden
act autonomously, without caring about Sancho’s “pleasure”, they
act like chemical or mechanical forces, independently of the
individual who possesses them. We learn further that a force is not
present if its manifestation is missing; the correction being made that
power requires an impulse for its manifestation. We do not learn,
however, how Sancho will decide whether it is the impulse or the
power that is lacking when the manifestation of power is deficient. On
the other hand, our unique investigator of nature teaches us that “it
is possible to strike fire from a stone”, and, as is always the case with
Sancho, he could not have chosen a more unfortunate example.
Sancho, like a simple village school-master, believes that the fire he
strikes in this way comes from the stone, where it was previously
latent. But any fourth-form schoolboy could tell him that in this
method of obtaining fire, a method long forgotten in all civilised
countries, by the friction of steel and stone, particles which become
red-hot owing to this friction are separated from the steel, and not
from the stone; that, consequently, the “fire”, which for Sancho is
not a definite relation, at a definite temperature, of certain bodies to
certain other bodies, in particular oxygen, but is an independent
thing, an “element”, a fixed idea, “the holy” — that this fire does not
come either from the stone or from the steel. Sancho might just as
well have said: one can make bleached linen from chlorine, but if the
“impulse”, viz., the unbleached linen, is lacking, then “nothing comes
out”. We shall take this opportunity, for Sancho’s “self-enjoyment”,
of noting an earlier fact of “unique” natural science. In the ode on
crime it is stated:

“Is there not a distant peal of thunder

And do you not see how the sky

Filled with foreboding is silent and overcast?” (p. 319 of “the book”).

It thunders and the sky is silent. Hence Sancho knows of some
other place than the sky from which thunder comes. Further, Sancho
notices the silence of the sky by means of his organ of sight — a feat
which no one will be able to imitate. Or perhaps Sancho hears
thunder and sees silence, so that the two phenomena can take place
simultaneously. We saw how Sancho in dealing with “apparitions”
made mountains represent the “spirit of loftiness”. b Here the silent
sky represents for him the spirit of foreboding.

a The right of use and of disposal. — Ed.

See this volume, p. 152. — F.d.

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423

Incidentally, it is not clear why Sancho here rails against the
“injunction to use one’s powers”. This injunction, after all, could
possibly be the missing “impulse”, which, it is true, fails to have
effect in the case of a stone, but the efficacy of which Sancho could
observe during the exercises of any battalion. That the “injunction”
is an “impulse” even for his feeble powers follows also from the fact
that for him it turns out to be a “stumbling block”.3

Consciousness is also a power which, according to the doctrine
which has just been enunciated, “always proves to be operative of
itself”. In accordance with this, therefore, Sancho ought not to have
set out to change consciousness, but at most the “impulse” which
affects consciousness; consequently Sancho would have written his
whole book in vain. But in this case, of course, he regards his moral
preaching and “injunctions” as a sufficient “impulse”.

“What an individual can become he will become. A born poet may be prevented,
owing to unfavourable circumstances, from being abreast of the times and creating
great works of art, for which much study is indispensable; but he will compose poetry
whether he is an agricultural labourer or has the good fortune to live at the Weimar
Court. A born musician will occupy himself with music, no matter whether on all
instruments” (he found this fantasy about “ all instruments” in Proudhon. See
“Communism”) “or only on a shepherd’s reed” (Virgil’s Eclogues, of course, again
come into the mind of our school-master). “A born philosophical intellect can prove its
worth either as a university philosopher or a village philosopher. Finally, a born dunce
always remains a blockhead. Indeed, innate limited intellects undoubtedly form the
most numerous class of mankind. And why should not the same differences occur
in the human species as are unmistakably seen in every species of animals?”
(p. 434).

Sancho has again chosen his example with his usual lack of skill. If
all his nonsense about born poets, musicians and philosophers is
accepted, then this example only proves, on the one hand, that a
born poet, etc., remains what he is from birth — namely a poet, etc.;
and, on the other hand, that the born poet, etc., in so far as he
becomes, develops, may, “owing to unfavourable circumstances”, not
become what he could become. His example, therefore, on the one
hand, proves nothing at all, and, on the other hand, proves the
opposite of what it was intended to prove; and taking both aspects
together it proves that either from birth or owing to circumstances,
Sancho belongs to “ the most numerous class of mankind” . However, he
shares the consolation of being a unique “blockhead” with this class
and with his own blockheadedness.

3 A pun on the word Anstoss — impulse, shock, scandal, offence; Stein des
Anstosses — stumbling block. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Here Sancho experiences the adventure with the magic potion
which Don Quixote brewed from rosemary, wine, olive oil and salt.
As Cervantes relates in the seventeenth chapter, after Sancho had
drunk this mixture he spent two hours in sweats and convulsions
pouring it out from both channels of his body. The materialist potion
which our valiant armour-bearer imbibed for his self-enjoyment
purges him of all his egoism in the extraordinary sense. We saw
above that Sancho suddenly lost all his solemnity when confronted
with the “impulse”, and renounced his “ability”, like of yore the
Egyptian magicians when confronted with the lice of Moses.3 Now we
observe two new attacks of faint-heartedness, in which he also gives
way “to unfavourable circumstances ” and finally even admits that his
original physical organisation is something that becomes crippled
without co-operation from him. What is left now to our bankrupt
egoist? He has no power over his original physical organisation; nor
can he control the “circumstances” and the “impulse” under the
influence of which this organisation develops; “what he is at every
instant” is not “his own creation”, but something created by the
interaction between his innate potentialities and the circumstances
acting on them — all this Sancho concedes. Unfortunate “creator”!
Most unfortunate “creation”!

But the greatest calamity comes at the end. Sancho, not satisfied
that already long ago he received the full count of the ires mil azotes y
trecientos en ambas sus valientes posaderas,b finally delivers himself
another and mighty blow by proclaiming himself a believer in species.
And what a believer in species! Firstly, he attributes division of
labour to species by making it responsible for the fact that some
people are poets, others musicians, and still others school-masters.
Secondly, he ascribes to species the existing physical and intellectual
defects of “the most numerous class of mankind” and makes it
responsible for the fact that under the rule of the bourgeoisie the
majority of individuals are like himself. According to his views on
innate limited intellects, one would have to explain the present
spread of scrofula from the fact that “the species” finds a special
satisfaction in making innate scrofulous constitutions form “the most
numerous class of mankind”. Even the most ordinary materialists
and medical men had got beyond such naive views long before the
egoist in agreement with himself was “called” upon by “the species”,
“unfavourable circumstances” and the “impulse” to make his debut
before the German public. Just as previously Sancho explained all

3 Exodus 8: 16-18. — Ed.

b Three thousand and three hundred lashes upon his ample buttocks. — Ed.

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425

crippling of individuals, and hence of their relations, by means of
the fixed ideas of school-masters, without worrying about the origin
of these ideas, so now he explains this crippling as merely due to the
natural process of generation. He has not the slightest idea that the
ability of children to develop depends on the development of their
parents and that all this crippling under existing social relations has
arisen historically, and in the same way can be abolished again in the
course of historical development. Even naturally evolved differences
within the species, such as racial differences, etc., which Sancho does
not mention at all, can and must be abolished in the course of
historical development. Sancho — who in this connection casts a
stealthy glance at zoology and so makes the discovery that “innate
limited intellects” form the most numerous class not only among
sheep and oxen, but also among polyps and infusoria, which have no
heads at all — has perhaps heard that it is possible to improve races of
animals and by cross-breeding to create entirely new, more perfect
varieties both for human enjoyment and for their own self-enjoy-
ment. “Why should not” Sancho be able to draw a conclusion from
this in relation to people as well?

We shall take this opportunity to “introduce episodically” Sancho’s
“transformations” in relation to species. We shall see that his attitude
to species is exactly the same as to the holy: the more he blusters
against it, the more he believes in it.

No. I. We have already seen that species engenders division of
labour and the crippling that takes place under existing social
circumstances and indeed in such a way that the species together with
its products is regarded as something immutable under all cir-
cumstances, as outside the control of people.

No. II. “Species is already realised owing to inherent constitution; on the other
hand, what you make of this constitution” (according to what was said above, this
ought to be: what “circumstances” make of it) “is the realisation of you. Your hand is
fully realised in the sense of species, otherwise it would not be a hand but, let us say, a
paw.... You make of it what and how you wish it to be and what you can make of it”
(Wigand, pp. 184, 185).

Here Sancho repeats in a different form what was already said in
No. I.

We have seen, therefore, from what has been said so far that
species, independently of control by individuals and the stage of
their historical development, brings into the world all physical and
spiritual potentialities, the immediate existence of individuals and, in
embryo, division of labour.

No. III. Species remains as “impulse”, which is only a general term
for the “circumstances” that determine the development of

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the original individual, again engendered by species. For Sancho
species is here precisely the same mysterious force which other
bourgeois call the nature of things and which they make respon-
sible for all relationships that are independent of them as bour-
geois, and whose interconnection, therefore, they do not under-
stand.

No. IV. Species taken as “what is possible for man” and “required
bv man” forms the basis of the organisation of labour in “Stirner’s
union”, where likewise what is possible for all and required by all is
regarded as a product of species.

No. V. We have already heard about the role that agreement plays
in the union.

Page 462: “If it is a matter of coming to an agreement or communicating with
one another, then, of course, I can only make use of the human means that are
at my disposal because I am at the same time a man” (i.e., a specimen of the
species).

Here, therefore, language is regarded as a product of the species.
That Sancho speaks German and not French, however, is something
he in no way owes to the species, but to circumstances. Incidentally,
in every modern developed language, partly as a result of the
historical development of the language from pre-existing material,
as in the Romance and Germanic languages, partly owing to the
crossing and mixing of nations, as in the English language, and
partlv as a result of the concentration of the dialects within a single
nation brought about by economic and political concentration, the
spontaneously evolved speech has been turned into a national
language. As a matter of course, the individuals at some time will
take completely under their control this product of the species as
well. In the union, language as such will be spoken, holy language,
the language of the holy — Hebrew, and indeed the Aramaic
dialect spoken by that “corporeal essence”, Christ. This “occurred”
to us here “against the expectation” of Sancho, and “indeed ex-
clusively because it seems to us that it could help to clarify the re-
mainder”.

No. VI. On pages 277, 278, we learn that “the species reveals itself
in nations, towns, estates, diverse corporations” and, finally, “in the
family”; hence it is perfectly logical that up to now it has “made
history”. Thus, here all preceding history, up to the unfortunate
history of the unique, becomes a product of the “species” and,
indeed, for the sufficient reason that this history has sometimes been
summed up under the title of the history of mankind, i.e., of the
species.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 427

No. VII. In what has been said so far Sancho has attributed to the
species more than any mortal had ever done before him, and he now
sums it up in the following proposition:

“Species is nothing ... species is only a conception" (spirit, spectre, etc.) (p. 2S9).

Ultimately, then, this “ nothing ’ of Sancho’ s, which is identical with
a “conception” , means nothing, for Sancho himself is “the creative
nothing”, and the species, as we have seen, creates a great deal, and
in doing so it can therefore very well be “nothing”. Moreover Sancho
tells us on page 456:

"Being justifies nothing at all; something imagined exists just as well as something
not imagined.”

Starting with page 448, Sancho spins out a yarn lasting thirty pages
in order to strike “fire” out of thought and criticism of the egoist in
agreement with himself. We have already experienced too many
expressions of his thought and criticism to give the reader further
“offence”3 with Sancho’s beggar’s broth. One spoonful of it will
suffice.

“Do you believe that thoughts fly about freely for the taking, so that anyone can
capture some of them and then put them forward against me as his inviolable
property? Everything that flies about, all of it is — mine” (p. 457).

Here Sancho poaches snipe existing only in the mind. We have
seen how many of the thoughts flying about he has captured for
himself. He fancied that he could catch them as soon as he put the
salt of the holy on their tails. This colossal contradiction between his
actual property in regard to thoughts and his illusions on that score
may serve as a classic and striking example of his entire property in
the extraordinary sense. It is precisely this contrast that constitutes
his self-enjoyment.

6. Solomon ’s Song of Songs
or

The Unique

Cessem do sabio Grego, e do Troiano,
As navega^oes grandes que fizeram;
Calle-se de Alexandro, e de Trajano
A fama das victorias que tiveram.

Cesse tudo o que a Musa antigua canta,
Que outro valor mais alto se alevanta.

3 A pun in the original: Anstoss gehen — an expression frequently used by
Stirner — can mean either “to give an impetus” or “to give offence”. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

E vos, Spreides minhas...

Dai-me huma furia grande, e sonorosa,

E nao de agreste avena, on frauta ruda;

Mas de tuba canora, e bellicosa

Que o peito accende, e o cor ao gesto muda,a

give me, o nymphs of the Spree, a song worthy of the heroes who
fight on your banks against Substance and Man, a song that will
spread over the whole world and will be sung in all lands — for it is a
matter here of the man whose deeds are

Mais do que promettia a forga humana,c

greater than mere “human” power can perform, the man who

. . . edificara

Novo reino que tanto sublimdra,d

who has founded a new kingdom among a far-off people, viz., the
“union ” — if is a matter here of being a

— tenro, e novo ramo florescente
De huma arvore de Christo, mais amada,e

of the tender and young blossoming shoot of a tree especially loved
by Christ, a tree which is nothing less than

certissima esperanga

Do augmento da pequena Christiandade/

a Cease man of Troy, and cease thou sage of Greece,
To boast of Navigations great ye made;

Let the high Fame of Alexander cease,

And Trajan’s Banners in the East display’d:

Cease All, whose Actions ancient Bards exprest:

A brighter Valour arises in the West.

And you (my Spree Nymphs)...

Give me a mighty Fury, Nor rude Reeds
Or rustic Bag-Pipes sound, But such as War’s
Lowd Instrument (the noble Trumpet) breeds,

Which fires the Breast, and stirs the blood to jars.

(This and the following quotations are from Luis de Camoes, Lxisiada. — Ed.)
b Marx and Engels substituted “Spree” — the river on which Berlin stands — for
Tagus. — Ed.

L Beyond what strength of human nature here. — Ed.

... acquir’d

A modern Scepter which to Heaven aspired. — Ed.

... fair and tender Blossom of that Tree
Belov’d by Him, who dy’d on one for Man. — Ed.

... certain Hope t’extend the Pale,

One day, of narrow Christianitie. — Ed.

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429

the surest hope of growth for faint-hearted Christianity — in a word,
it is a matter of something “unprecedented”, the “unique”.*

Everything that is to be found in this unprecedented song of songs
about the unique was in existence earlier in the “book”. We mention
this chapter only for the sake of good order; so that we should be
able to do it properly we have left the examination of some points until
now and we shall briefly recapitulate others.

Sancho’s “ego” has gone through the full gamut of soul migration.
We already met it as the egoist in agreement with himself, as corvee
peasant, as trader in thoughts, as unfortunate competitor, as owner,
as a slave who has had one of his legs torn out, as Sancho tossed into
the air by the interaction between birth and circumstances, and in a
hundred other shapes. Here it bids us farewell as an “ inhuman
being ”, under the same banner as that under which it made its entry
into the New Testament.

“Only the inhuman being is the real man” (p. 232).

This is one of the thousand and one equations in which Sancho
expounds his legend of the holy.

The concept “man” is not the real man.

The concept “man”= Man.

Man = not the real man.

The real man = the non-man,

= the inhuman being.

“Only the inhuman being is the real man. ”

Sancho tries to explain to himself the harmlessness of this
proposition by means of the following transformations:

“It is not so difficult to express in a few plain words what an inhuman being is; it is
a man [...] who does not correspond to the concept of what is human. Logic calls this a
nonsensical judgment. Would one have the right to pronounce this judgment that
someone can be a man without being a man, if one did not admit the validity of the
hypothesis that the concept of man can be separated from his existence, that the
essence can be separated from the appearance? People say: so and so seems to be a
man, but he is not a man. People have pronounced this nonsensical judgment
throughout many centuries: moreover, during this long period of time there have
only been inhuman beings. What individual did ever correspond to his concept?”

(p. 232).

This passage is again based on our school-master’s fantasy about
the school-master who has created for himself an ideal of “Man” and
“put it into the heads” of other people, a fantasy which forms the
basic theme of “the book”.

Sancho calls it a hypothesis that the concept and existence, the
essence and appearance of “man” can be separated, as though the

* Cf. Camoes; Lusiadas, I, 1-17.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

possibility of this separation is not already expressed in the very
words he uses. When he says concept, he is speaking of something
different from existence ; when he says essence, he is speaking of
something different from appearance. It is not these statements that he
brings into contradiction, but they themselves are the expressions of
a contradiction. Hence the only question that could have been raised
is whether it is permissible for him to range something under these
points of view; and in order to deal with this Sancho would have had
to consider the actual relations of people who have been given other
names in these metaphysical relations. For the rest, Sancho’s own
arguments about the egoist in agreement with himself and about
rebellion show how these points of view can be made to diverge,
while his arguments about peculiarity, possibility and reality — in
connection with “self-enjoyment” — show how they can be made
simultaneously to coincide and to diverge.

The nonsensical judgment of the philosophers that the real man is
not man is in the sphere of abstraction merely the most universal,
all-embracing expression of the actually existing universal contradic-
tion between the conditions and needs of people. The nonsensical
form of the abstract proposition fully corresponds to the nonsensical
character, carried to extreme lengths, of the relations of bourgeois
society, just as Sancho’s nonsensical judgment about his environ-
ment— they are egoists and at the same time they are not
egoists — corresponds to the actual contradiction between the exis-
tence of the German petty bourgeois and the tasks which existing
relations have imposed on them and which they themselves entertain
in the form of pious wishes and desires. Incidentally, philosophers
have declared people to be inhuman, not because they did not
correspond to the concept of man, but because their concept of man
did not correspond to the true concept of man, or because they had
no true understanding of man. Tout comme chez nous,3 in “the book”,
where Sancho also declares that people are non-egoists for the sole
reason that they have no true understanding of egoism.

In view of its extreme triviality and indisputable certainty, there
should have been no need to mention the perfectly inoffensive
proposition that the idea of man is not the real man, that the idea of a
thing is not the thing itself — a proposition which is also applicable to
a stone and to the idea of a stone, in accordance with which Sancho
should have said that the real stone is non-stone. But Sancho’s

a A modified phrase from Nolantde Fatouville’s comedv Arlequin, empereur dans la
lune — “tout comme ici" (just as here) is the stock response made by the people listening
to Harlequin’s inventions about life on the moon. — Ed.

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431

well-known fantasy that only because of the domination of ideas and
concepts mankind has up to now been subjected to all sorts of
misfortunes, makes it possible for him to link his old conclusions
again with this proposition. Sancho’s old opinion that one has only to
get a few ideas out of one’s headin order to abolish from the world the
conditions which have given rise to these ideas, is reproduced here in
the form that one has only to get out of one’s head the idea of man in
order to put an end to the actually existing conditions which are
today called inhuman — whether this predicate “inhuman” expresses
the opinion of the individual in contradiction with his conditions or
the opinion of the normal, ruling society about the abnormal,
subjected class. In just the same way, a whale taken from the ocean
and put in the Kupfergraben,121 if it possessed consciousness, would
declare this situation created by “unfavourable circumstances” to be
unwhale-like, although Sancho could prove that it is whale-like, if
only because it is its, the whale’s, own situation — that is precisely how
people argue in certain circumstances.

On page 185, Sancho raises the important question:

“But how to curb the inhuman being who dwells in each individual? How can one
manage not to set free the inhuman being along with the human being? All liberalism
has a mortal enemy, an invincible opponent, as God has the devil; at the side of the
human being there is always the inhuman being, the egoist, the individual. State,
society, mankind cannot master this devil.”

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,

“And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth,
Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle....

“And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp
of the saints about, and the beloved city” (Revelation of St. John 20:7-9).

In the form in which Sancho understands it, the question again
becomes sheer nonsense. He imagines that people up to now have
always formed a concept of man, and then won freedom for
themselves to the extent that was necessary to realise this concept;
that the measure of freedom that they achieved was determined each
time by their idea of the ideal of man at the time; it was thus
unavoidable that in each individual there remained a residue which
did not correspond to this ideal and, hence, since it was “inhuman”,
was either not set free or only freed malgre eux.

In reality, of course, what happened was that people won freedom
for themselves each time to the extent that was dictated and
permitted not by their ideal of man, but by the existing productive
forces. All emancipation carried through hitherto has been based,
however, on restricted productive forces. The production which
these productive forces could provide was insufficient for the whole
of society and made development possible only if some persons

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

satisfied their needs at the expense of others, and therefore
some — the minority — obtained the monopoly of development, while
others — the majority — owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their
most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e., until the creation
of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any develop-
ment. Thus, society has hitherto always developed within the
framework of a contradiction — in antiquity the contradiction be-
tween free men and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility
and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. This explains, on the one hand, the abnormal, “inhu-
man” way in which the oppressed class satisfies its needs, and, on the
other hand, the narrow limits within which intercourse, and with it
the whole ruling class, develops. Hence this restricted character of
development consists not only in the exclusion of one class from
development, but also in the narrow-mindedness of the excluding
class, and the “inhuman” is to be found also within the ruling class.
This so-called “inhuman” is just as much a product of present-day
relations as the “human” is; it is their negative aspect, the
rebellion — which is not based on any new revolutionary productive
force — against the prevailing relations brought about by the
existing productive forces, and against the way of satisfying needs
that corresponds to these relations. The positive expression
“human” corresponds to the definite relations predominant at a
certain stage of production and to the way of satisfying needs
determined by them, just as the negative expression “inhuman”
corresponds to the attempt to negate these predominant relations
and the way of satisfying needs prevailing under them without
changing the existing mode of production, an attempt that this stage
of production daily engenders afresh.

For our saint, such world-historical struggles are reduced to a
mere collision between Saint Bruno and “the mass”. Cf. the whole
criticism of humane liberalism, especially page 192 et seq.

Thus, our simple-minded Sancho with his naive little statement
about the inhuman being and with his talk of getting-man-out-of-
one’s-head, thanks to which the inhuman being also disappears and
there is no longer any measure for individuals, finally arrives at the
following result. He regards the physical, intellectual and social
crippling and enslavement which as a result of the existing
relations afflict an individual, as the individuality and peculiarity of
that individual; like an ordinary conservative he calmly recognises
these relations once he has freed his mind of all worry by getting
out of his head the philosophers’ idea of these relations. Just as
here he declares fortuitous features imposed on the individual to be

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433

the latter’s individuality, so earlier (cf. “Logic”), in connection with
the ego, he abstracted not only from any fortuity, but also in general
from any individuality.3

About the “inhuman” great result obtained by him Sancho sings in
the following Kyrie eleison,h which he puts into the mouth of “the
inhuman being”:

“I was despicable because 1 sought my better self outside me;

“I was the inhuman, because I dreamed of the human ;

“I was like the pious ones who hunger for their true ego and always remain poor

sinners ;

“I thought of myself only in comparison with someone else;

“I was not all in all, I was not — unique.

“Now, however, I cease to appear to myself as the inhuman;

“I cease to measure myself by man and to let others measure me;

“I cease to recognise anything above myself —

“I was inhuman, but I am no longer inhuman, I am the unique !” Hallelujah!

We shall not dwell further here on how “the inhuman” — which, it
may be said in passing, put itself in the right frame of mind by
“ turning its back” “on itself and the critic”, Saint Bruno — how “the
inhuman” here “appears”, or does not “appear” to itself. We shall
only point out that the “unique” (it or he) is characterised here by his
getting the holy out of his head for the nine-hundredth time,
whereby, as we in our turn are compelled to repeat for the
nine-hundredth time, everything remains as before, not to mention
the fact that it is no more than a pious wish.

We have here, for the first time, the unique person, Sancho, who
with the litany mentioned above has received the accolade of
knighthood, now appropriates his new, noble name. Sancho arrives
at his uniqueness by getting “Man” out of his head. He thereby
ceases “to think of himself only in comparison with someone else”
and “to recognise something above him”. He becomes incompara-
ble. This is again the same old fantasy of Sancho’s that it is not the
needs of individuals, but concepts, ideas, “the holy” — here in the
shape of “Man” — that are the sole tertium comparationis and the sole
bond between individuals.* He gets an idea out of his head and
thereby becomes unique.

To become “unique” in his sense of the word he must above all
prove to us his freedom from premises.

* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Sancho, who notices
nothing but “the holy”, need not bother about the fact that it is through their needs
that individuals are linked together, and that the development of the productive
forces up to now implies the domination of one section over the other.

3 See this volume, pp. 278-81. — Ed.

b Lord, have mercy. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Page 470: “ Your thought has as its premise not thought, but you. But thus you
nevertheless have yourself as a premise? Yes, but not to me, but to my thought. I
am before my thought. It follows hence that no thought precedes my thinking, or that
my thinking is without any premise. For the premise which I am for my thinking is not
one created by thinking, not one that is thought, but ... is the owner of thinking, and
proves only that thinking is nothing but — property.”

“We are prepared to allow” that Sancho does not think before he
thinks, and that he and everyone else is in this respect a thinker
without premises. Similarly we concede that he does not have any
thought as the premise of his existence, i.e., that he was not created
by thoughts. If for a moment Sancho abstracts from all his
thoughts — which with his meagre assortment cannot be very
difficult — there remains his real ego, but his real ego within the
framework of the actual relations of the world that exist for it. In this
way he has divested himself for a moment of all dogmatic premises,
but now for the first time the real premises begin to come to light for
him. And these real premises are also the premises of his dogmatic
premises which, whether he likes it or not, will reappear to him to-
gether with the real ones so long as he does not obtain different real
premises, and with them also different dogmatic premises, or so long
as he does not recognise in a materialistic way that the real premises
are the premises of his thinking, and as a result his dogmatic ones
will disappear altogether. Just as his development up to now and his
Berlin environment have at present led to the dogmatic premise of
egoism in agreement with itself, so, despite all imaginary freedom
from premises, this premise will remain with him as long as he fails
to overcome its real premises.

As a true school-master, Sancho still continues to strive for the
famous Hegelian “premiseless thinking”, i.e., thinking without
dogmatic premises, which in Hegel too is only a pious wish. Sancho
believed he could achieve this by a skilful leap and even surpass it by
going in pursuit of the premiseless ego. But both the one and the
other eluded his grasp.

Then Sancho tries his luck in another fashion:

Pages 214, 215: “Make full use” of the demand for freedom! “Who shall become
free? You, I, we. Free from what? From everything that is not you, not I, not we. I,
therefore, am the core.... What remains if I become free from everything that is not I?
Only I and nothing but I.”

So that was the poodle’s core!

A travelling scholar? The incident makes me laugh.3

Goethe, Faust, I. Teil, 1. “Studierzimmerszene” . — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

435

“Everything that is not you, not I, not we” is, of course, here again
a dogmatic idea, like state, nationality, division of labour, etc. Once
these ideas have been subjected to criticism — and, in Sancho’s
opinion, this has already been done by “criticism”, namely critical
criticism — he again imagines that he is also free from the actual state,
actual nationality and division of labour. Consequently the ego,
which is here the “core”, which “has become free from everything
that is not I” — is still the above-mentioned premiseless ego with
everything that it has not got rid of.

If, however, Sancho were once to tackle the subject of “becoming
tree” with the desire of freeing himself not merely from categories,
but from actual fetters, then such liberation would presuppose a
change common to him and to a large mass of other people, and
would produce a change in the state of the world which again would
be common to him and others. Although his “ego” “remains” after
liberation, it is hereafter a totally changed ego sharing with others a
changed state of the world which is precisely the premise, common to
him and others, of his and their freedom, and it follows that the
uniqueness, incomparability and independence of his “ego” again
come to nothing.

Sancho tries again in a third fashion:

Page 237: “Their disgrace is not that they” (Jew and Christian) “ exclude each other
but that this only half occurs. If they could be perfect egoists they would totally exclude
each other.”

Page 273: “If one desires only to resolve the contradiction one grasps its meaning
in too formal and feeble a way. The contradiction deserves rather to be sharp-
ened."'

Page 274: “Only when you recognise your contradiction fully and when everyone
asserts himself from head to foot as unique will you no longer simply conceal your
contradiction.... The final and most decisive contradiction — that between one unique
person and another — goes basically beyond the bounds of what is called contradic-
tion.... As a unique person you have nothing more in common with the other and, for
that reason, nothing that makes you separate from him or hostile to him....
Contradiction disappears in perfect ... separateness or uniqueness.”

Page 183: “I do not want to have or to be something special in relation to others;
nor do I measure myself by others.... I want to be everything I can be, and to have
everything I can have. What do I care whether others are or have something similar to
me? They can neither be nor have something equal, the same. I do nothing
detrimental to them any more than it is to the detriment of the cliff that I have the
advantage of movement. If they could have it, they would have it. Doing nothing to
the detriment of other people, that is the meaning of the demand to have no
privileges.... One should not regard oneself as ‘something special ’, e.g., Jew or
Christian. Well, I regard myself not as something special but as unique. True, I have a
resemblance to others; but this holds only for comparison or reflection; in fact,
however, I am incomparable, unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my spirit is not their
spirit. If you bring them under the general concept ‘flesh’, ‘spirit’, then those are your
thoughts, which have nothing to do with my flesh, my spirit.”

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Page 234: “Human society perishes because of the egoists, for they no longer treat
one another as human beings, but act egoistically as an ego against a you that is totally
distinct from and hostile to me.’’

Page 180: “As though one individual will not always seek out another, and as
thougn one person does not have to adapt himself to another, when he needs him. But
the difference is that in this case the individual actually unites with another individual,
whereas previously he was linked to him by a bond.”

Page 178: “Only when you are unique can you in your intercourse with one
another be what you actually are.”

As regards Sancho’s illusion about the intercourse of the unique
ones “as what they actually are”, about “the uniting of the individual
with the individual”, in short, about the “union”, that has been
completely dealt with. We shall merely point out: whereas in the
union each regarded and treated the other merely as his object,
his property (cf. page 167 and the theory of property and
exploitation), in the “Commentary” ( Wigand , p. 157), on the
contrary, the governor of the island of Barataria realises and
recognises that the other also belongs to himself, is his own, is unique,
and in that capacity also becomes Sancho’s object, although no longer
Sancho’s property. In his despair, he saves himself only by the
unexpected idea that “because of this” he “forgets himself in sweet
self-oblivion”, a delight which he “affords himself a thousand times
every hour” and which is still further sweetened by the sweet
consciousness that nevertheless he has not “completely disap-
peared”. The result, therefore, is the old wisdom that each exists for
himself and for others.

Let us now reduce Sancho’s pompous statements to their actual
modest content.

The bombastic phrases about “contradiction” which has to be
sharpened and taken to extremes, and about the “something
special”, which Sancho does not want to have as his advantage,
amount to one and the same thing. Sancho wants, or rather believes
he wants, that intercourse between individuals should be purely
personal, that their intercourse should not be mediated through
some third thing (cf. competition). This third thing here is the
“something special”, or the special, not absolute, contradiction, i.e.,
the position of individuals in relation to one another determined by
present-day social relations. Sancho does not want, for example,
two individuals to be in “contradiction” to one another as bourgeois
and proletarian; he protests against the “special” which forms the
“advantage” of the bourgeois over the proletarian; he would like to
have them enter into a purely personal relation, to associate with one
another merely as individuals. He does not take into consideration
that in the framework of division of labour personal relations

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

437

necessarily and inevitably develop into class relations and become
fixed as such and that, therefore, all his talk amounts simply
to a pious wish, which he expects to realise by exhorting the
individuals of these classes to get out of their heads the idea of their
“contradiction” and their “special” “privilege”. In the passages
from Sancho quoted above, everything turns only on people’s opinion
of themselves, and his opinion of them, what they want and what
he wants. “Contradiction” and the “special” are abolished by a
change of “ opinion ” and “wanting”.

Even that which constitutes the advantage of an individual as such
over other individuals, is in our day at the same time a product of
society and in its realisation is bound to assert itself as privilege, as we
have already shown Sancho in connection with competition. Further,
the individual as such, regarded by himself, is subordinated to
division of labour, which makes him one-sided, cripples and
determines him.

What, at best, does Sancho’s sharpening of contradiction and
abolition of the special amount to? To this, that the mutual relations
of individuals should be their behaviour to one another, while their
mutual differences should be their self-distinctions (as one empirical
self distinguishes itself from another). Both of these are either, as
with Sancho, an ideological paraphrase of what exists, for the rela-
tions of individuals under all circumstances can only be their mutual
behaviour, while their differences can only be their self-distinctions.
Or they are the pious wish that they should behave in such a way and
differ from one another in such a way, that their behaviour does not
acquire independent existence as a social relationship independent
of them, and that their differences from one another should not
assume the material character (independent of the person) which
they have assumed and daily continue to assume.

Individuals have always and in all circumstances “proceeded from
themselves” , but since they were not unique in the sense of not needing
any connections with one another, and since their needs, consequent-
ly their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs, connected
them with one another (relations between the sexes, exchange,
division of labour), they had to enter into relations with one
another. Moreover, since they entered into intercourse with one
another not as pure egos, but as individuals at a definite stage of
development of their productive forces and requirements, and since
this intercourse, in its turn, determined production and needs, it
was, therefore, precisely the personal, individual behaviour of indivi-
duals, their behaviour to one another as individuals, that created the
existing relations and daily reproduces them anew. They entered

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

into intercourse with one another as what they were, they proceeded
“from themselves”, as they were, irrespective of their “outlook on
life”. This “outlook on life” — even the warped one of the
philosophers — could, of course, only be determined by their actual
life. Hence it certainly follows that the development of an individual
is determined by the development of all the others with whom he is
directly or indirectly associated, and that the different generations of
individuals entering into relation with one another are connected
with one another, that the physical existence of the later generations
is determined by that of their predecessors, and that these later
generations inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse
accumulated by their predecessors, their own mutual relations being
determined thereby. In short, it is clear that development takes place
and that the history of a single individual cannot possibly be
separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individ-
uals, but is determined by this history.

The transformation of the individual relationship into its opposite,
a purely material relationship, the distinction of individuality and
fortuity by the individuals themselves, is a historical process, as we
have already shown,3 and at different stages of development it
assumes different, ever sharper and more universal forms. In the
present epoch, the domination of material relations over individuals,
and the suppression of individuality by fortuitous circumstances, has
assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting
existing individuals a very definite task. It has set them the task of
replacing the domination of circumstances and of chance over
individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and
circumstances. It has not, as Sancho imagines, put forward the
demand that “I should develop myself”, which up to now every
individual has done without Sancho’s good advice; it has on the
contrary called for liberation from a quite definite mode of
development. This task, dictated by present-day relations, coincides
with the task of organising society in a communist way.

We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of
affairs in which relations become independent of individuals, in
which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal
relations of individuals are subordinated to general class relations,
etc. — that the abolition of this state of affairs is determined in the
final analysis by the abolition of division of labour. We have also
shown that the abolition of division of labour is determined by the
development of intercourse and productive forces to such a degree

a See this volume, pp. 75-81. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max 439

of universality that private property and division of labour become
fetters on them. We have further shown that private property can be
abolished only on condition of an all-round development of
individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and
the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals
that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them,
i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives. We have
shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private
property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse
have developed so far that, under the domination of private
property, they have become destructive forces, and because the
contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit.
Finally, we have shown that the abolition of private property and of
the division of labour is itself the association of individuals on
the basis created by modern productive forces and world inter-
course.3

Within communist society, the only society in which the genuine
and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this
development is determined precisely by the connection of individu-
als, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites
and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all,
and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals
on the basis of the existing productive forces. We are, therefore, here
concerned with individuals at a definite historical stage of develop-
ment and by no means merely with individuals chosen at random,
even disregarding the indispensable communist revolution,
which itself is a general condition for their free development.
The individuals’ consciousness of their mutual relations will, of
course, likewise be completely changed, and, therefore, will no
more be the “principle of love” or devoument than it will be
egoism.

Thus, “uniqueness” — taken in the sense of genuine development
and individual behaviour, as outlined above — presupposes not only
things quite different from good will and right consciousness, but
even the direct opposite of Sancho’s fantasies. With him “unique-
ness” is nothing more than an embellishment of existing conditions,
a little drop of comforting balm for the poor, impotent soul that has
become wretched through wretchedness.

As regards Sancho’s “incomparability ’ , the situation is the same as
with his “uniqueness”. He himself will recall, if he is not completely
“lost” in “sweet self-oblivion”, that the organisation of labour in

a See Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology. — Ed.

16—2086

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“Stirner’s union of egoists” was based not only on the comparability
of needs, but also on their equality. And he assumed not only equal
needs, but also equal activity, so that one individual could take the
place of another in “human work”. And the extra remuneration of
the “unique” person, crowning his efforts — what other basis had it
than the fact that his performance was compared with that of others
and in view of its superiority was better paid? And how can Sancho
talk at all about incomparability when he allows money — the means of
comparison that acquires independent existence in practice — to
continue in being, subordinates himself to it and allows himself to be
measured by this universal scale in order to be compared with
others? It is quite evident that he himself gives the lie to his doctrine
of incomparability. Nothing is easier than to call equality and
inequality, similarity and dissimilarity, determinations of reflection.
Incomparability too is a determination of reflection which has the
activity of comparison as its premise. To show that comparison is not
at all a purely arbitrary determination of reflection, it is enough to
give just one example, money, the permanent tertium comparationis of
all people and things.

Incidentally, incomparability can have different meanings. The
only meaning in question here, namely “uniqueness” in the sense of
originality, presupposes that the activity of the incomparable
individual in a definite sphere differs from the activity of his equals.
Persiani is an incomparable singer precisely because she is a singer
and is compared with other singers, and indeed by people who are
able to recognise her incomparability through comparison based on
normal hearing and musical training. Persianrs singing and the
croaking of a frog are incomparable, although even here there could
be a comparison, but it would be a comparison between a human
being and a frog, and not between Persiani and a particular unique
frog. Only in the first case is it possible to speak of a comparison
between individuals, in the second it is a matter only of their
properties as species or genus. A third type of incomparability — the
incomparability of Persiani’s singing with the tail of a comet — we
leave to Sancho for his “self-enjoyment”, since at any rate he finds
pleasure in “nonsensical judgments”, although even this absurd
comparison has a real basis in the absurdity of present-day rela-
tions. Money is the common measure for all, even the most hetero-
geneous things.

Incidentally, Sancho’s incomparability amounts to the same empty
phrase as his uniqueness. Individuals are no longer to be measured
by some tertium comparationis independent of them, but comparison
should be transformed into their self-distinction, i.e., into the free

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

441

development of their individuality, which, moreover, is brought
about by their getting “fixed ideas” out of their heads.

Incidentally, Sancho is acquainted only with the type of compari-
son made by scribblers and ranters, which leads to the magnificent
conclusion that Sancho is not Bruno and Bruno is not Sancho. On
the other hand, he is, of course, unacquainted with the sciences
which have made considerable advances just by comparing and
establishing differences in the spheres of comparison and in which
comparison acquires a character of universal importance — i.e., in
comparative anatomy, botany, philology, etc.

Great nations — the French, North Americans, English — are con-
stantly comparing themselves with one another both in practice and
theory, in competition and in science. Petty shopkeepers and
philistines, like the Germans, who are afraid of comparison and
competition, hide behind the shield of incomparability supplied
them by their manufacturer of philosophical labels. Not only in their
interests, but also in his own, has Sancho refused to tolerate any
comparison.

On page 415 Sancho says:

“There exists no one equal to me,"

and on page 408 association with “my equals” is depicted as the
dissolution of society in intercourse:

“The child prefers intercourse with his equals to society."

However, Sancho sometimes uses “equal to me” and “equal” in
general in the sense of “the same ”, e.g., the passage on page 183
quoted above:

“They can neither be nor have something equal, the same.”

Here he arrives at his final “new turn of expression”, which he
uses especially in the “Commentary”.

The uniqueness, the originality, the “peculiar” development of
individuals which, according to Sancho, does not for example
occur in all “human works”, although no one will deny that one
stove-setter does not set a stove in the “same” way as another; the
“unique” development of individuals which, in the opinion of this
same Sancho, does not occur in religious, political, etc., spheres (see
“Phenomenology”), although no one will deny that of all those who
believe in Islam not one believes in it in the “same” way as another
and to this extent each of them is “unique”, just as among citizens
not one has the “same” attitude to the state as another if only
because it is a matter of his attitude, and not that of some-other — all

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

this much praised “uniqueness” which [according to Sancho] was so
distinct from “sameness” , identity of the person, that in all individuals
who have so far existed he could hardly see anything but
“specimens” of a species, is thus reduced here to the identity of a
person with himself, as established by the police, to the fact that one
individual is not some other individual. Thus Sancho, who was going
to take the world by storm, dwindles to a clerk in a passport office.

On page 184 of the “Commentary” he relates with much unction
and great self-enjoyment that he does not become replete when the
Japanese Emperor eats, because his stomach and that of the
Japanese Emperor are “unique”, “incomparable stomachs”, i.e., not
the same stomachs. If Sancho believes that in this way he has
abolished the social relations hitherto existing or even only the laws
of nature, then his naivete is excessively great and it springs merely
from the fact that philosophers have not depicted social relations as
the mutual relations of particular individuals identical with them-
selves, and the laws of nature as the mutual connections of these
particular bodies.

The classic expression which Leibniz gave to this old proposition
(to be found on the first page of any physics textbook as the theory
of the impenetrability of bodies) is well known:

“Opus tamen est ... ut quaelibet monas differat ab alia quacunque, neque enim
unquam dantur in natura duo entia, quorum unum exasse conveniat cum altero.”3
( Principia Philosophiae seu Theses, etc.)

Sancho’s uniqueness is here reduced to a quality which he shares
with every louse and every grain of sand.

The greatest disclaimer with which his philosophy could end is
that it regards the realisation that Sancho is not Bruno, which is
obvious to every country bumpkin and police sergeant, to be one of
the greatest discoveries, and that it considers the fact of this
difference to be a real miracle.

Thus the “critical hurrah” of our “virtuoso of thought” has
become an uncritical miserere.

After all these adventures our “unique” squire again sails into the
harbour of his native serf’s cottage. “The title spectre of his book”*3
rushes out to meet him “joyfully”. Her first enquiry is: how is the
ass?

a “However, every monad necessarily differs from every other; for in nature there
are never two things that exactly coincide with each other.” — Ed.

b An allusion to Stirner’s wife, Marie Dahnhardt (see this volume, p. 400). — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

443

Better than his master, replies Sancho.

Thanks be to God for so much goodness. But tell me now, my
friend, what profit have you got out of your squiredom? What new
dress have you brought me?

I have brought nothing like that, replies Sancho, but I have
brought “the creative nothing, the nothing from which I myself as
creator create everything”. This means you will yet see me in the
capacity of church father and archbishop of an island and, indeed,
one of the best it is possible to find.

God grant it, my treasure, and may it be soon, for we sorely need
it. But as regards the island you mention, I don’t know what you
mean.

Honey is not for the ass’s mouth, replies Sancho. You will see it for
yourself in due course, wife. But even now I can tell you that nothing
is more pleasant in the world than the honour of seeking adventures
as an egoist in agreement with himself and as the squire of the
rueful countenance. True, most of these adventures do not “reach
the final goal” so that “ human requirement is satisfied” (tan como el
hombre querria2), for ninety-nine adventures out of a hundred go
awry and follow a tangled course. I know this from experience, for in
some of them I was cheated and from others I went home soundly
pounded and thrashed. But in spite of all that, it is a fine thing, for at
any rate the “unique” requirement is always satisfied when one
wanders through the whole of history, quoting all the books in the
Berlin reading-room, getting an etymological night’s lodging in all
languages, falsifying political facts in all countries, boastfully
throwing down gages to all dragons and ostriches, elfs, field
hobgoblings and “spectres”, exchanging blows with all church
fathers and philosophers and yet, finally, paying for it only with your
own body (cf. Cervantes, I, Chapter 52).

a As the human being desires. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

2. APOLOGETICAL COMMENTARY 122

Although formerly, when in a state of humiliation (Cervantes,
Chapters 26 and 29), Sancho had all kinds of “doubts” about
accepting an ecclesiastical benefice, nevertheless, after pondering
over the changed circumstances and his earlier preparation as beadle
to a religious brotherhood (Cervantes, Chapter 21), he finally
decided to “get” this doubt “out of his head”. He became archbishop
of the island of Barataria and a cardinal and as such sits with solemn
mien and arch-ecclesiastical dignity among the foremost of our
Council. Now, after the long episode of “the book”, we return to this
Council.

True, we find that “brother Sancho” in his new station in life has
changed considerably. He now represents the ecclesia triumphans a
— in contrast to the ecclesia militarist in which he was before. Instead
of the belligerent fanfares of “the book” there is a solemn
seriousness; “Stirner” has taken the place of the “ego”. This shows
how true the French saying is: qu’il n’y a qu’un pas du sublime au
ridicule .c Since he became a father of the church and began to write
pastoral epistles, Sancho calls himself nothing but “Stirner”. He
learned this “unique” way of self-enjoyment from Feuerbach, but
unfortunately it befits him no better than playing the lute does his
ass. When he speaks of himself in the third person, everyone sees
that Sancho the “creator”, after the manner of Prussian non-
commissioned officers, addresses his “creation” Stirner in the third
person, and should on no account be confused with Caesar.d The

a Church triumphant. — Ed.
b Church militant. — Ed.

c There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous (an expression used by
Napoleon on many occasions). — Ed.

d The reference is to Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de bello Gallico (the author wrote
in the third person about himself). — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

445

impression is all the more comical because Sancho commits this
inconsistency only in order to compete with Feuerbach. Sancho’s
“self-enjoyment” of his performance as a great man becomes here
malgre lui an enjoyment for others.

The “ special ” thing that Sancho does in his “Commentary”,
insofar as we have not “used it up” already in the episode, consists in
his regaling us with a new series of variations on the familiar themes
already played with such long-winded monotony in “the book”.
Here Sancho’s music, which like that of the Indian priests of Vishnu
knows only one note, is played a few registers higher. But its narcotic
effect remains, of course, the same. Thus, for example, the antithesis
of “egoistical” and “holy” is again thoroughly kneaded, this time
under the signboards of “interesting” and “uninteresting”, and then
of “interesting” and “absolutely interesting”, an innovation which,
incidentally, could only be of interest to lovers of unleavened bread,
in common parlance matzos. One should not, of course, blame an
“educated”4 Berlin petty bourgeois for the belletristic distortion of
the interested into the interesting.

All the illusions which, according to Sancho’s pet crotchet, were
created by “school-masters” appear here “as difficulties — doubts”,
which “only spirit created” and which “the poor souls who allowed
themselves to be talked into these doubts” “should ... overcome” by
“ light-heartedness ” (the famous getting out of one’s head) (p. 162).
Then comes a “treatise” in which he considers whether “doubts”
should be got out of one’s head by “thinking” or by “thoughtless-
ness”, and a critical-moral adagio in which he laments in minor
chords:

“Thought must on no account be suppressed by rejoicing” (p. 166).

For the tranquillity of Europe, and especially of the oppressed old
merry and young sorry England,5 as soon as Sancho has become
somewhat accustomed to his episcopal chaise percee,c he issues from
this eminence the following gracious pastoral epistle:

“Civil society is not at all dear to Stirner. and he has no intention of extending it so that
it swallows up the state and the family” (p. 189).

Let Mr. Cobden and Monsieur Dunoyer bear this in mind.

In his capacity of archbishop, Sancho immediately takes control of
the spiritual police, and on page 193 he gives Hess a reprimand for
confusing matters, which “are contrary to police regulations” and

a In the manuscript the Berlin dialect form jebildeten is used. — Ed.
b The phrase “old merry and young sorry England” is in English in the
manuscript. — Ed.

c Night commode. — Ed.

446

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the more unpardonable the greater the efforts that our church fa-
ther continually makes to establish identity. To prove to this same
Hess that “Stirner” also possesses the “heroic courage of lying”, that
orthodox quality of the egoist in agreement with himself, he sings on
page 188: “But Stirner does not say at all — contrary to what Hess
makes him say — that the whole mistake of previous egoists was
merely that they were not conscious of their egoism.” Cf.
“Phenomenology” and the entire “book”. The other quality of the
egoist in agreement with himself — credulity — he displays on page
i82, where he “does not dispute ” Feuerbach’s opinion that “ the
individual is a communist”. A further exercise of his police powers
consists in censuring (on page 154) all his reviewers for not having
dealt “in more detail with egoism as Stirner conceives it”. Indeed,
they all made the mistake of thinking that it was a question of actual
egoism, whereas it was merely a question of “Stirner’s” conception
of it.

The “Apologetical Commentary” also proves Sancho’s aptitude
for acting as a church father by beginning with a piece of hypocrisy:

“A brief reply may be of benefit, if not perhaps to the reviewers named, then at
least to some other reader of the book” (p. 147).

Here Sancho plays the devotee and asserts that he is prepared to
sacrifice his valuable time for the “benefit” of the public, although
he constantly assures us that he always has in view only his own
benefit, and although he is only trying here to save his own clerical
skin.

Thereby we have finished with the “special” of the “Commenta-
ry”. The “ unique ” feature, which, however, occurs already in “the
book”, on page 491, has been kept by us in reserve not so much for
the “benefit” of “some other reader” as for “Stirner’s” own benefit.
One hand washes the other, from which it indisputably follows that
“the individual is a communist”.

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to
descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is
the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given
thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make
language into an independent realm. This is the secret of
philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have
their own content. The problem of descending from the world of
thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of
descending from language to life.

We have shown3 that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent

3 See Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology. — Ed.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

447

existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations
of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that
exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of
ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these
thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in
particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German
petty-bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve
their language into the ordinary language, from which it is
abstracted, in order to recognise it as the distorted language of the
actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in
themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only
manifestations of actual life.

Sancho, who follows the philosophers through thick and thin,
must inevitably seek the philosopher’s stone, the squaring of the circle
and elixir of life, or a “word” which as such would possess the
miraculous power of leading from the realm of language and
thought to actual life. Sancho has been so infected by his long years
of association with Don Quixote that he fails to notice that this “task”
of his, this “vocation”, is nothing but the result of his faith in
weighty philosophical books of knight-errantry.

Sancho begins by showing us once again the domination of the
holy and of ideas in the world, this time in the new form of the
domination of language or phrase. Language, of course, becomes a
phrase as soon as it is given an independent existence.

On page 151, Sancho calls the modern world “a world of phrases,
a world where in the beginning was the word”. He describes in more
detail the motives for his chase after the magic word:

“Philosophical speculation strove to find a predicate which would be so universal as
to include everyone in itself.... In order that the predicate should include everyone in
it, each should appear in it as subject, i.e., not merely as what he is, but as who he is”
(p. 152).

Since speculation “sought” such predicates, which Sancho had
previously called vocation, designation, task, species, etc., therefore
actual people up to now “sought” themselves “in the word, the logos,
the predicate” (p. 153). Up to now one has used the name when one
wanted to distinguish in language one individual from another,
merely as an identical person. But Sancho is not satisfied with
ordinary names; because philosophical speculation has set him the
task of finding a predicate so universal that it would include in itself
everyone as subject, he seeks the philosophical, abstract name, the
“Name” that is above all names, the name of names, name as a
category which, for example, would distinguish Sancho from Bruno,

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

and both of them from Feuerbach, as precisely as their own proper
names, and which would nevertheless be applicable to all three and
also to all other people and corporeal beings — an innovation which
would introduce the greatest confusion into all bills of exchange,
marriage contracts, etc., and at one blow put an end to all notaries
and registry offices. This miraculous name, this magic word, which
in language spells the death of language, this asses’ bridge leading to
life and the highest rung of the Chinese celestial ladder is — the
unique. The miraculous properties of this word are sung in the
following stanzas:

“The unique one should be only the last, dying statement of you and me, should be
only that statement which is transformed into opinion:

“a statement that is no longer a statement,

“a muted, mute statement’’ (p. 153).

“With him” (the unique one) “what is not expressed is the chief thing” (p. 149).

He “is without determination” (ibid.).

“He points to the content, lying outside or beyond the concept” (ibid.).

This is “a concept without determination and cannot be made more definite by any
other concept” (p. 150).

This is the philosophical “ christening ” of worldly names (p. 150).

“The unique is a word devoid of thought.

“It has no thought content.”

“It expresses a person” “that cannot exist a second time, and consequently cannot
be expressed either;

“For if he could be expressed actually and completely, then he would exist a
second time, he would exist in the expression” (p. 151).

Having thus sung the properties of this word, he celebrates in the
following antistrophic stanzas the results obtained by the discovery of
its miraculous power:

“With the unique one the realm of absolute thoughts is completed” (p. 150).

“He is the keystone of our world of phrases” (p. 151).

“He is logic that comes to an end as a phrase” (p. 153).

“In the unique one, science can merge in life,

“By transforming its this into such-and-such a one,

“Who no longer seeks himself in the word, the logos, the predicate” (p. 153).

True, as regards his reviewers Sancho has had the unpleasant
experience of learning that the unique, too, can be “fixed as a
concept”, and “that is what the opponents do” (p. 149), who are so
opposed to Sancho that they do not feel at all the expected magical
effect of the magical word, but instead sing, as in the opera: Ce n’est
pas ga, ce n’est pas ga! With great exasperation and solemn serious-
ness Sancho turns particularly against his Don Quixote-Szeliga, for
in him the misunderstanding presupposes an open “rebellion” and
a complete misapprehension of his position as a “creature”.

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. III. Saint Max

449

“If Szeliga had understood that the unique, being a completely empty phrase or
category, therebv is no longer a category, he might, perhaps, have recognised it as the
name of that for which he still has no name” (p. 179).

Here, therefore, Sancho expressly recognises that he and his Don
Quixote are striving towards one and the same goal, with the only
difference that Sancho imagines that he has discovered the true
morning star, whereas Don Quixote, still in darkness

uf dem wildin leber-mer
der grunt-losen werlde swebt.*a

Feuerbach said in his Philosophic der Zukunft,b p. 49:

“Being, based on sheer inexpressibles, is therefore itself something inexpressible.
Yes, the inexpressible. Where words end, only there does life begin, only there can the
secret of being be deduced.”

Sancho has found the transition from the expressible to the
inexpressible, he has found the word which is simultaneously more
and less than a word.

We have seen that the whole problem of the transition from
thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in
philosophical illusion, i.e., it is justified only for philosophical
consciousness, which cannot possibly be clear about the nature and
origin of its apparent separation from life. This great problem,
insofar as it at all entered the minds of our ideologists, was bound, of
course, to result finally in one of these knights-errant setting out in
search of a word which, as a word, formed the transition in question,
which, as a word, ceases to be simply a word, and which, as a word, in
a mysterious superlinguistic manner, points from within language to
the actual object it denotes; which, in short, plays among words the
same role as the Redeeming God-Man plays among people in
Christian fantasy. The emptiest, shallowest brain among the
philosophers had to “end” philosophy by proclaiming his lack of
thought to be the end of philosophy and thus the triumphant entry
into “corporeal” life. His philosophising mental vacuity was already
in itself the end of philosophy just as his unspeakable language was
the end of all language. Sancho’s triumph was also due to the
fact that of all philosophers he was least of all acquainted with
actual relations, hence philosophical categories with him lost the last

* Meister Kuonrat von Wurzeburc, Diu guldin Smitte, Verse 143.

a Swims in the wild liver-sea
of the unfathomable world.

(Liver-sea — mythical congealed sea in which ships stuck fast.) — Ed.

b Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

vestige of connection with reality, and with that the last vestige of
meaning.

So now go forth, pious and faithful servant Sancho, go or, rather,
ride forth on your ass, to your unique’s self-enjoyment, “use up”
your “ unique ” to the last letter, the unique whose miraculous title,
power and courage have already been sung by Calderon in the
following words:

The unique —

El valiente cam peon,

El generoso adalid,

El gallardo caballero,

El ilustre Paladin,

El siempre fiel Cristiano,

El Almirante feliz
De Africa, el Rey soberano
De Alejandria, el Cadi
De Berberia, de Egipto el Cid,

Moravito, y Gran Senor
De Jerusalen ,a

“In conclusion, it would not be unsuitable to remind” Sancho, the
Grand Seignior of Jerusalem, of Cervantes’ “criticism” of Sancho in
Don Quixote, Chapter 20, page 171, Brussels edition, 1617. (Cf. the
“Commentary”, p. 194.)

a — The valiant fighter,
the generous leader,
the gallant knight,
the illustrious Paladin,
the always faithful Christian,
the fortunate Admiral of Africa,
the sovereign King of Alexandria,
the Judge of Barbary,
the Cid of Egypt,

Marabout, and Grand Seignior
of Jerusalem.

(Calderon, La puenta de Mantible, Act 1. The words “El siempre fiel
Cristiano” (“The always faithful Christian”) have been inserted by Marx and
Engels.)— Ed.

CLOSE OF THE LEIPZIG COUNCIL

After driving all their opponents from the Council, Saint Bruno
and Saint Sancho, also called Max, conclude an eternal alliance and
sing the following touching duet, amicably nodding their heads to
one another like two mandarins.

Saint Sancho.

“The critic is the true spokesman of the mass.... He is its sovereign and general in
the war of liberation against egoism.’’ (The book, p. 187.)

Saint Bruno.

“Max Stirner is the leader and commander-in-chief of the Crusaders” (against
criticism). “At the same time he is the most vigorous and courageous of all fighters.”
( Wigand ,a p. 124.)

Saint Sancho.

“We pass on now to placing political and s'ocial liberalism before the tribunal of
humane or critical liberalism” (i.e., critical criticism). (The book, p. 163.)

Saint Bruno.

“Confronted by the unique and his property, the political liberal, who desires to
break down self-will, and the social liberal, who desires to destroy property, both
collapse. They collapse under the critical” (i.e., stolen from criticism) “knife of the
unique.” (Wigand, p. 124.)

Saint Sancho.

“No thought is safe from criticism, because criticism is the thinking mind itself ...
Criticism, or rather he” (i.e., Saint Bruno). (The book, pp. 195, 199.)

Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”. — Ed.

452

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Saint Bruno (interrupts him, making a bow).

“The critical liberal alone ... does not fall [before] criticism because he himself
is [the critic].” [Wigand, p. 124.]

Saint Sancho.

“Criticism, and criticism alone, is abreast of the times.... Among social theories,
criticism is indisputably the most perfect.... In it the Christian principle of love, the
true social principle, reaches its purest expression, and the last possible experiment is
made to release people from exclusiveness [and] repulsion; it is a struggle against
egoism in its simplest and therefore its most rigid form.” (The book, p. 177.)

Saint Bruno.

“This ego is ... the completion and culminating point of a past historical epoch. The
unique is the last refuge in the old world, the last hiding-place from which the old
world can deliver its attacks” on critical criticism.... '‘This ego is the most extreme, the
most powerful and most mighty egoism of the old world” (i.e., of Christianity)....
“This ego is substance in its most rigid rigidity.” ( Wigand , p. 124.)

After this cordial dialogue, the two great church fathers dissolve
the Council. Then they silently shake hands. The unique “forgets
himself in sweet self-oblivion” without, however, getting “completely
lost”, and the critic “smiles” three times and then “irresistibly,
confident of victory and victorious, pursues his path”.

Volume II

CRITIQUE OF GERMAN SOCIALISM
ACCORDING TO ITS VARIOUS PROPHETS

TRUE SOCIALISM

The relation between German socialism and the proletarian
movement in France and England is the same as that which we found
in the first volume (cf. “Saint Max”, “Political Liberalism”) between
German liberalism, as it has hitherto existed, and the movement of
the French and English bourgeoisie.3 Alongside the German
communists, a number of writers have appeared who have absorbed
a few French and English communist ideas and amalgamated them
with their own German philosophical premises. These “socialists” or
“true socialists”, as they call themselves, regard foreign communist
literature not as the expression and the product of a real movement
but as purely theoretical writings which have been evolved — in the
same way as they imagine the German philosophical systems to have
been evolved — by a process of “pure thought”. It never occurs to
them that, even when these writings do preach a system, they spring
from the practical needs, the conditions of life in their entirety of a
particular class in a particular country. They innocently take on trust
the illusion, cherished by some of these literary party representa-
tives, that it is a question of the “most reasonable” social order and
not the needs of a particular class and a particular time. The German
ideology, in the grip of which these “true socialists” remain,
prevents them from examining the real state of affairs. Their activity
in face of the “unscientific” French and English consists primarily in
holding up the superficiality and the “crude” empiricism of these
foreigners to the scorn of the German public, in eulogising “German
science” and declaring that its mission is to reveal for the first time

See this volume, pp. 193-94. — Ed.

456

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the truth of communism and socialism, the absolute, true socialism.
They immediately set to work discharging this mission as representa-
tives of “German science”, although they are in most cases hardly
more familiar with “German science” than they are with the original
writings of the French and English, which they know only from the
compilations of Stein, Oelckers,a etc. And what is the “truth” which
they impart to socialism and communism? Since they find the ideas
contained in socialist and communist literature quite unintelligi-
ble— partly by reason of their ignorance even of the literary
background, partly on account of their above-mentioned misunder-
standing of this literature — they attempt to clarify them by invoking
the German ideology and notably that of Hegel and Feuerbach.
They detach the communist systems, critical and polemical writings
from the real movement, of which they are but the expression, and
force them into an arbitrary connection with German philosophy.
They detach the consciousness of certain historically conditioned
spheres of life from these spheres and evaluate it in terms of true,
absolute, i.e., German philosophical consciousness. With perfect
consistency they transform the relations of these particular individu-
als into relations of “Man”; they interpret the thoughts of these
particular individuals concerning their own relations as thoughts
about “Man”. In so doing, they have abandoned the real historical
basis and returned to that of ideology, and since they are ignorant of
the real connection, they can without difficulty construct some
fantastic relationship with the help of the “absolute” or some other
ideological method. This translation of French ideas into the
language of the German ideologists and this arbitrarily constructed
relationship between communism and German ideology, then,
constitute so-called “true socialism”, which is loudly proclaimed, in
the terms used by the Tories for the English constitution, to be “the
pride of the nation and the envy of all neighbouring nations”.

Thus “true socialism” is nothing but the transfiguration of
proletarian communism, and of the parties and sects that are more
or less akin to it, in France and England within the heaven of the
German mind and, as we shall also see, of the German sentiment.
True socialism, which claims to be based on “science”, is primarily
another esoteric science; its theoretical literature is intended only for
those who are initiated into the mysteries of the “thinking mind”.
But it has an exoteric literature as well; the very fact that it is
concerned with social, exoteric relations means that it must carry on

a Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs.
Theodor Oelckers, Die Bewegung des Socialismus und Communismus. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism

457

some form of propaganda. In this exoteric literature it no longer
appeals to the German “thinking mind” but to the German
“sentiment”. This is all the easier since true socialism, which is no
longer concerned with real human beings but with “Man”, has lost
all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love
of mankind. It turns as a result not to the proletarians but to the two
most numerous classes of men in Germany, to the petty bourgeoisie
with its philanthropic illusions and to the ideologists of this very same
petty bourgeoisie: the philosophers and their disciples; it turns, in
general, to that “common”, or uncommon, consciousness which at
present rules in Germany.

The conditions actually existing in Germany were bound to lead to
the formation of this hybrid sect and the attempt to reconcile
communism with the ideas prevailing at the time. It was just as
inevitable that a number of German communists, proceeding from a
philosophical standpoint, should have arrived, and still arrive, at
communism by way of this transition while others, unable to extricate
themselves from this ideology, should go on preaching true socialism
to the bitter end. We have, therefore, no means of knowing whether
the “true socialists” whose works were written some time ago and are
criticised here still maintain their position or whether they have
advanced beyond it. We are not at all concerned with the
individuals; we are merely considering the printed documents as the
expression of a tendency which was bound to occur in a country so
stagnant as Germany.

But in addition true socialism has in fact enabled a host of
Young-German literary men,123 quacks and other literati to exploit
the social movement. Even the social movement was at first a merely
literary one because of the lack of real, passionate, practical party
struggles in Germany. True socialism is a perfect example of a social
literary movement that has come into being without any real party
interests and now, after the formation of the communist party, it
intends to persist in spite of it. It is obvious that since the appearance
of a real communist party in Germany, the public of the true
socialists will be more and more limited to the petty bourgeoisie and
the sterile and broken-down literati who represent it.

DIE RHEINISCHEN JAHRBUCHER

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRUE SOCIALISM

A. “COMMUNISMUS, SOCIALISMUS, HUMANISMUS ”a

RHEINISCHE JAHRBUCHER, 1. BD., P. 167 ET SEQ.

We begin with this essay because it displays quite consciously and
with great self-confidence the national German character of true
socialism.

Page 168: “It seems that the French do not understand their own men of genius.
At this point German science comes to their aid and in the shape of socialism presents the
most reasonable social order, if one can speak of a superlative degree of reasonableness.”

“German science” here, therefore, presents a social order, in fact
“the most reasonable social order’,’ “in the shape of socialism”.
Socialism is reduced to a branch of that omnipotent, omniscient,
all-embracing German science which is even able to set up a society.
It is true that socialism is French in origin, but the French socialists
were “essentially” Germans, for which reason the real Frenchmen “did
not understand” them. Thus the writer can say:

“ Communism is French, socialism is German ; the French are lucky to possess so apt a
social instinct, which will serve them one day as a substitute for scientific investigation.
This result has been determined by the course of development of the two nations; the
French arrived at communism by way of politics ” (now it is clear, of course, how the
French people came to communism); “the Germans arrived at socialism ” (namely
“true socialism”) “by way of metaphysics, which eventually changed into anthropology.
Ultimately both are resolved in humanism .”

After having transformed communism and socialism into two
abstract theories, two principles, there is, of course, nothing easier
than to excogitate at will any Hegelian unity of these two opposites
and to give it any vague name one chooses. One has thereby not only

The author of this article is Hermann Semmig. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 459

submitted “the course of development of the two nations” to a
piercing scrutiny but has also brilliantly demonstrated the superiori-
ty of the speculative individual over both Frenchmen and Germans.

Incidentally, the sentence is copied more or less literally from
Piittmann’s Biirgerbuch, p. 43 and elsewhere3; the writer’s “scientific
investigation” of socialism is likewise limited to a reinterpretative
reproduction of ideas contained in this book, in the Einundzwanzig
Bogen and in other writings dating from the early days of German
communism.

We will only give a few examples of the objections raised to
communism in this essay:

Page 168: “Communism does not combine the atoms into an organic whole.”

The demand that the “atoms” should be combined into an
“organic whole” is no more realistic than the demand for the
squaring of the circle.

“Communism, as it is actually advocated in France, its main centre, takes the form
of crude opposition to the egoistical dissipation of the shopkeeper’s state; it never
transcends this political opposition; it never attains to unconditional, unqualified
freedom” (ibid.).

Voila the German ideological postulate of “unconditional, unqual-
ified freedom”, which is only the practical formula for “uncondition-
al, unqualified thought”. French communism is admittedly “crude”
because it is the theoretical expression of a real opposition; however,
according to the writer, French communism ought to have
transcended this opposition by imagining it to be already overcome.
Compare also Biirgerbuch, p. 43, etc.

“Tyranny can perfectly well persist within communism, since the latter refuses to
permit the continuance of the species” (p. 168).

Hapless species! “Species” and “tyranny” have hitherto existed
simultaneously; but it is precisely because communism abolishes the
“species” that it can allow “tyranny” to persist. And how, according to
our true socialist, does communism set about abolishing the
“species”? It “has the masses in view” (ibid.).

“In communism man is not conscious of his essence ... his dependence is reduced by
communism to the lowest, most brutal relationship, to dependence on crude matter — the
separation of labour and enjoyment. Man does not attain to free moral activity.”

To appreciate the “scientific investigation” which has led our true
socialist to this proposition, it is necessary to consider the following
passage:

a This refers to the article “Ueber die Noth in unserer Gesellschaft und deren
Abhiilfe” by Moses Hess published in Deutsches Biirgerbuch fiir 1845. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“French socialists and communists ... have by no means theoretically understood
the essence of socialism ... even the radical” (French) “communists have still by no
means transcended the antithesis of labour and enjoyment ... have not yet risen to the
idea of free activity.... The only difference between communism and the world of the
shopkeeper is that in communism the complete alienation of real human property is to be
made independent of all fortuity, i.e., is to be idealised” ( Biirgerbuch , p. 43).

That is to say, our true socialist is here reproaching the French for
having a correct consciousness of their actual social conditions,
whereas they ought to bring to light “Man’s” consciousness of “his
essence”. All objections raised by these true socialists against the
French amount to this, that they do not consider Feuerbach’s
philosophy to be the quintessence of their movement as a whole. The
writer proceeds from the already existing proposition of the
separation of labour and enjoyment. Instead of starting with this
proposition, he ideologically turns the whole thing upside-down,
begins with the missing consciousness of man, deduces from it
“dependence on crude matter” and assumes this to be realised in the
“separation of labour and enjoyment”. Incidentally we shall see later
on where our true socialist gets to with his independence “from
crude matter”.

In fact, all these gentlemen display a remarkable delicacy of
feeling. Everything shocks them, especially matter; they complain
everywhere of crudity. Earlier we have already had a “ crude
antithesis”, now we have “the most brutal relationship” of “depend-
ence on crude matter”.

With gaping jaws the German cries:

Too crude love must not be
Or you’ll get an infirmity.3

German philosophy in its socialist disguise appears, of course, to
investigate “crude reality”, but it always keeps at a respectable
distance and, in hysterical irritation, cries: noli me tangere!h

After these scientific objections to French communism, we come to
several historical arguments, which brilliantly demonstrate the “free
moral activity” and the “scientific investigation” of our true socialist
and his independence of crude matter.

On page 170 he arrives at the “result” that the only communism
which “exists” is “crude French communism” (crude once again).

3 Modified quotation from Heine’s poem “Sie sassen und tranken am Teetisch...”
in Lyrisches Intermezzo. The first line of Heine’s poem reads: With gaping jaws the
canon cries. — Ed.

b Touch me not! (John 20:17). — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 461

The construction of this truth a priori is carried out with great “social
instinct” and shows that “man has become conscious of his essence”.
Listen to this:

“There is no other communism, for what Weitling has produced is only an
elaboration of Fourierist and communist ideas with which he became acquainted in
Paris and Geneva.”

“There is no” English communism, “for what Weitling”, etc.
Thomas More, the Levellers,124 Owen, Thompson, Watts, Holyoake,
Harney, Morgan, Southwell, Goodwyn Barmby, Greaves, Edmonds,
Hobson, Spence will be amazed, or turn in their graves, when they
hear that they are no communists “for” Weitling went to Paris and
Geneva.

Moreover, Weitling’ s communism does seem to be different in
kind from the “crude French” variety, in vulgar parlance, from
Babouvism, since it contains some of “Fourier’s ideas” as well.

“The communists were particularly good at drawing up systems or even complete
social orders (Cabet’s Icarie, La Felicite ,a Weitling). All systems are, however, dogmatic
and dictatorial” (p. 170).

By this verdict on systems in general true socialism has, of course,
saved itself the trouble of acquainting itself at first hand with the
communist systems. With one blow it has overthrown not only Icarie
but also every philosophical system from Aristotle to Hegel, the
Systeme de la nature ,b the botanical systems of Linne and Jussieu
and even the solar system. Incidentally, as to the systems themselves
they nearly all appeared in the early days of the communist
movement and had at that time propaganda value as popular novels,
which corresponded perfectly to the still undeveloped consciousness
of the proletarians, who were then just beginning to play an active
part. Cabet himself calls his Icarie a “roman philosophique” and
he should on no account be judged by his system but rather by his
polemical writings, in fact his whole activity as a party leader. In
some of these novels, e.g., Fourier’s system, there is a vein of true
poetry; others, like the systems of Owen and Cabet, show not a shred
of imagination and are written in a business-like calculating way or
else with an eye to the views of the class to be influenced, in sly lawyer
fashion. As the party develops, these systems lose all importance and
are at best retained purely nominally as catchwords. Who in France
believes in Icarie, who in England believes in the plans of Owen,

a Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie ; Francois de Chastellux, De la Felicite
publique. — Ed.

b The author of this work is Paul Henri Holbach. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

which he preached in various modifications with an eye to
propaganda among particular classes or with respect to the altered
circumstances of the moment? Fourier’s orthodox disciples of the
Democratic pacifique show most clearly how little the real content of
these systems lies in their systematic form; they are, for all their
orthodoxy, doctrinaire bourgeois, the very antipodes of Fourier. All
epoch-making systems have as their real content the needs of the
time in which they arose. Each one of them is based on the whole of
the antecedent development of a nation, on the historical growth of
its class relations with their political, moral, philosophical and other
consequences. The assertion that all systems are dogmatic and
dictatorial gets us nowhere with regard to this basis and this content
of the communist systems. Unlike the English and the French, the
Germans did not encounter fully developed class relations. The
German communists could, therefore, only base their system on the
relations of the class from which they sprang. It is, therefore,
perfectly natural that the only existing German communist system
should be a reproduction of French ideas in terms of a mental
outlook which was limited by the petty circumstances of the artisan.

“The madness of Cabet, who insists that everybody should
subscribe to his Populaire” , p. 168, is proof of the tyranny that persists
within communism. If our friend first distorts the claims which a
party leader makes on his party, impelled by particular cir-
cumstances and the danger of failing to concentrate limited financial
means, and then evaluates them in terms of the “essence of man”, he
is indeed bound to conclude that this party leader and all other party
members are “mad” whereas purely disinterested figures, like
himself and the “essence of man”, are of sound intellect. But let him
find out the true state of affairs from Cabet’s Ma ligne droite.

The whole antithesis of our author, and of German true socialists
and ideologists in general, to the real movements of other nations is
finally epitomised in one classic sentence. The Germans judge
everything sub specie aeterni a (in terms of the essence of Man),
foreigners view everything practically, in terms of actually existing
men and circumstances. The thoughts and actions of the foreigner
are concerned with temporariness, the thoughts and actions of the
German with eternity. Our true socialist confesses this as follows:

“The very name of communism, the contrary of competition, reveals its
one-sidedness; but is this bias, which may very well have value now as a party name, to
last for ever}”

From the standpoint of eternity (cf. Benedict Spinoza, Ethica. Pars quinta). — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 463

After having thus thoroughly disposed of communism, the writer
proceeds to its contrary, socialism.

“Socialism establishes that anarchic system which is an essential characteristic of the
human race and the universe” (p. 170) and for that very reason has hitherto never
existed for “the human race”.

Free competition is too “crude” to be regarded by our true
socialist as an “anarchic system”.

“Relying entirely on the moral core of mankind, socialism” decrees that “the union
of the sexes is and should be merely the highest intensification of love; for only what
is natural is true and what is true is moral” (p. 171).

The reason why “the union, etc., etc. is and should be,” can be
applied to everything. For example, “socialism, relying entirely on
the moral core ” of the apes, might just as well decree that the
masturbation which occurs naturally among them “is, and should be,
merely the highest intensification of” self-“love; for only what is
natural is true and what is true is moral”.

It would be hard to say by what standard socialism judges what is
“natural”.

“Activity and enjoyment coincide in the peculiar nature of man; they are
determined by this and not by the products external to us.”

“But since these products are indispensable for activity, that is to say, for true life,
and since by reason of the common activity of mankind as a whole they have, so to
speak, detached themselves from mankind, they are or should be the common
substratum of further development for all (community of goods).”

“Our present-day society has indeed relapsed into savagery to such an extent that
some individuals fall upon the products of another’s labour with beastly voracity and
at the same time they indolently allow their own essence to decay (rentiers); as a
necessary consequence, others are driven to mechanical labour; their property (their own
human essence) has been stunted, not by idleness, but by exhausting exertion
(proletarians).... The two extremes of our society, rentiers and proletarians, are,
however, at the same stage of development. Both are dependent upon things external to
them” or are “Negroes”, as Saint Max would say (pp. 1 69, 170).

The “results” reached above by our “Mongol” concerning “our
Negroism” are the most perfect achievements which true socialism
has, “so to speak, detached from itself, as a product indispensable for
true life”; our Mongol, by reason of “the peculiar nature of man”,
believes that “mankind as a whole” is bound to “fall upon” them
with “beastly voracity”.

The four concepts — “rentiers”, “proletarians”, “mechanical” and
“community of goods” — are for our Mongol at any rate “products
external to him”; as far as they are concerned, his “activity” and his
“enjoyment” consist in representing them simply as anticipated
terms for the results of his own “mechanical labour”.

Society, we learn, has relapsed into savagery and consequently the

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

individuals who form this very society suffer from all kinds of
infirmities. Society is abstracted from these individuals, it is made
independent, it relapses into savagery on its own, and the individuals
suffer only as a result of this relapse. The expressions — beast of prey,
idler and possessor of “one’s own decaying essence” — are the first
result of this relapse; whereupon we learn to our horror that these
expressions define the “rentier”. The only comment necessary is
that this “allowing one’s own essence to decay” is nothing but a
philosophically mystified manner of speaking used in an endeavour
to comprehend “idleness”, the actual character of which seems to be
very little known.

The two expressions, “stunted growth of their own human essence
as a result of exhausting exertion” and “being driven to mechanical
labour”, are the second “necessary consequence” of the first result
of the relapse into savagery. These two expressions are a “necessary
consequence of the fact that the rentiers allow their own essence to
decay”, and are known in vulgar parlance, we learn, once more to
our horror, as “proletarians”.

The sentence, therefore, contains the following sequence of cause
and effect: It is a fact that proletarians exist and that they work
mechanically. Why are proletarians driven to “mechanical labour”?
Because the rentiers “allow their own essence to decay”. Why is it
that the rentiers allow their own essence to decay? Because “our
present-day society has relapsed into savagery to such an extent”.
Why has it relapsed into savagery? Ask thy Maker.

It is characteristic of our true socialist that he sees “the extremes of
our society” in the opposition of rentiers and proletarians. This
opposition has pretty well been present at all fairly advanced stages
of society and has been belaboured by all moralists since time
immemorial; it was resurrected right at the beginning of the
proletarian movement, at a time when the proletariat still had
interests in common with the industrial and petty bourgeoisie.
Compare, for example, the writings of Cobbett and P. L. Courier or
Saint-Simon, who originally numbered the industrial capitalists
among the travailleurs a as opposed to the oisifsb, the rentiers.
Stating this trivial antithesis, which moreover it expresses, not in
ordinary language, but in the sacred language of philosophy,
presenting this childish discovery in abstract, sanctified and quite
inappropriate terms — this is what here, as in all other cases, the
thoroughness of that German science which has been perfected by

a Workers. — Ed.
b Idlers. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 465

true socialism amounts to. The conclusion puts the finishing touch to
this kind of thoroughness. Our true socialist here merges the totally
dissimilar stages of development of the proletarians and the rentiers
into “one stage of development”, because he ignores their real stages
of development and subsumes them under the philosophic phrase:
“dependence upon things external to them”. True socialism has
here discovered the stage of development at which the dissimilarity
of all the stages of development in the three realms of nature, in
geology and history, vanishes into thin air.

Although he detests “dependence upon things external to him”,
our true socialist nevertheless admits that he is dependent upon
them, “since products”, i.e., these very things, “are indispensable for
activity” and for “true life”. He makes this shamefaced admission so
that he can clear the road for a philosophical construction of the
community of goods — a construction that lapses into pure nonsense
so that we need merely draw the reader’s attention to it.

We now come to the first of the passages quoted above. Here
again, “independence from things” is claimed in respect of activity
and enjoyment. Activity and enjoyment “are determined” by “the
peculiar nature of man”. Instead of tracing this peculiar nature in
the activity and enjoyment of the men who surround him — in which
case he would very soon have found how far the products external to
us have a voice in the matter, too — he makes activity and enjoyment
“coincide in the peculiar nature of man”. Instead of visualising the
peculiar nature of men in their activity and their manner of
enjoyment, which is conditioned by their activity, he explains both by
invoking “the peculiar nature of man”, which cuts short any further
discussion. He abandons the real behaviour of the individual and
again takes refuge in his indescribable, inaccessible, peculiar nature.
We see here, moreover, what the true socialists understand by “free
activity”. Our author imprudently reveals to us that free activity is
activity which “is not determined by things external to us”, i.e., actus
purus, pure, absolute activity, which is nothing but activity and is in
the last instance tantamount to the illusion of “pure thought”. It
naturally sullies the purity of this activity if it has a material basis and
a material result; the true socialist deals only reluctantly with impure
activity of this kind; he despises its product, which he terms “a mere
refuse of man”, and not “a result” (p. 169). The subject from whom
this pure activity proceeds cannot, therefore, be a real sentient
human being; it can only be the thinking mind. This “free activity”,
thu^translated into German, is nothing but the foregoing “uncondi-
tional, unqualified freedom” expressed in a different way. Inciden-
tally, that this talk of “free activity”, which merely serves the true

466

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

socialists to conceal their ignorance of real production, amounts in
the final analysis to “pure thought” is also shown by the fact that the
writer gives us as his last word the postulate of true cognition.

“This separation of the two principal parties of this age” (namely, French crude
communism and German socialism) “is a result of the developments of the last two years,
which started more particularly with Hess’ Philosophie der That, in Herwegh’s
Einundzwanzig Bogen. Consequently it was high rime to throw a little more light on the
shibboleths of the social parties ” (p. 173).

Here we have, on the one hand, the actually existing communist
party in France with its literature and, on the other, a few German
pseudo-scholars who are trying to comprehend the ideas of this
literature philosophically. The latter are treated just as much as the
former as a “ principal party of this age” , as a party, that is to say, of
infinite importance not only to its immediate antithesis, the French
communists, but also to the English Chartists and communists, the
American national reformers 125 and indeed to every other party “of
this age”. It is unfortunate that none of these know of the existence
of this “principal party”. But it has for a considerable time been the
fashion among German ideologists for each literary faction,
particularly the one that thinks itself “most advanced”, to proclaim
itself not merely “one of the principal parties”, but actually “ the
principal party of this age”. We have among others, “the principal
party” of critical criticism, the “principal party” of egoism in
agreement with itself and now the “principal party” of the true
socialists. In this fashion Germany can boast a whole horde of
“principal parties”, whose existence is known only in Germany and
even there only among the small set of scholars, pseudo-scholars and
literati. They all imagine that they are weaving the web of world
history when, as a matter of fact, they are merely spinning the long
yarn of their own imaginings.

This “principal party” of the true socialists is “a result of the
developments of the last two years, which started more particularly
with Hess’ Philosophie ”. It is “a result”, that is to say, of the
developments “of the last two years” when our author first got
entangled in socialism and found it was “high time” to enlighten
himself “a little more”, by means of a few “shibboleths”, on what he
considers to be “social parties”.

Having thus dismissed communism and socialism, our author
introduces us to the higher unity of the two, to humanism. Now we
are entering the domain of “Man” and the entire true history of our
true socialist will be enacted in Germany alone.

“All quibbles about names are resolved in humanism; wherefore communists,
wherefore socialists? We are human beings ” (p. 1 72) — tous freres, tous amis.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 467

Swim not, brothers, against the stream.

That’s only a useless thing!

Let us climb up on to Templow hill
And cry: God save the King!3

Wherefore human beings, wherefore beasts, wherefore plants,
wherefore stones? We are bodies!

There follows an historical discourse which is based upon German
science and which “will one day help to replace the social instinct” of
the French. Antiquity — naivete, the Middle Ages — Romanticism, the
Modern Age — Humanism. By means of these three trivialities, the
writer has, of course, constructed his humanism historically and
showed it to be the truth of the old Humaniora.126 Compare “Saint
Max” in the first volume for constructions of this kind; he
manufactures such wares in a much more artistic and less amateurish
way.

On page 172 we are informed that

“the final result of scholasticism is that cleavage of life which was abolished by Hess”.

Here then, the cause of the “cleavage of life” is shown to be
theory. It is difficult to see why these true socialists mention society at
all if they believe with the philosophers that all real cleavages are
caused by conceptual cleavages. On the basis of this philosophical belief
in the power of concepts to make or destroy the world, they can
likewise imagine that some individual “abolished the cleavage of life”
by “abolishing” concepts in some way or other. Like all German
ideologists, the true socialists continually mix up literary history and
real history as equipotential. This habit is, of course, very
understandable among the Germans, who conceal the abject part
-they have played and continue to play in real history by equating
the illusions, in which they are so rich, with reality.

And now to the “last two years”, during which German science has
so thoroughly disposed of all problems that nothing remains to the
other nations but to carry out its decrees.

“Feuerbach only partially completed, or rather only began, the task of
anthropology, the regaining by man of his estranged essence” (the essence of man or
the essence of Feuerbach?); “he destroyed the religious illusion, the theoretical
abstraction, the God-Man, whereas Hess annihilates the political illusion, the
abstraction of his ability [Vermdgenb], of his activity” (does this refer to Hess or to
man?), “that is, he annihilates wealth. It was the work of Hess which freed man from the
last of the forces external to him, and made him capable of moral activity — for all the
unselfishness of earlier times” (before Hess) “was only an illusory unselfishness — and

a From Heine’s poem “Verkehrte Welt” in his verse cycle Zeitgedichte. — Ed.
b Vermogen can mean ability, faculty, power, or fortune, wealth, property. — Ed.

468

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

raised him once more to his former dignity; for was man ever previously” (before
Hess) “esteemed for what he actually was? Was he not judged by what he possessed?
He was esteemed for his money” (p. 171).

It is characteristic of all these high-sounding phrases about
liberation, etc., that it is always “man” who is liberated. Although it
would appear from the pronouncements made above that “wealth”,
“money”, and so on, have ceased to exist, we nevertheless learn in
the following sentence:

“Now that these illusions” (money, viewed sub specie aeterni, is, indeed, an illusion,
Vor n’est qu’une chimere ) “have been destroyed, we can think about a new, human order
of society” (ibid.).

But this is quite superfluous since

“the recognition of the essence of man has as a necessary and natural result a life which
is truly human” (p. 172).

To arrive at communism or socialism by way of metaphysics or
politics, etc., etc. — these phrases beloved of true socialists merely
indicate that such and such a writer has adopted communist ideas
(which have reached him from without and have arisen in
circumstances quite different from his) translating them into the
mode of expression corresponding to his former standpoint, and
formulating them in accordance with this standpoint. Which of these
points of view is predominant in a nation, whether its communist
outlook has a political or metaphysical or any other tinge depends, of
course, upon the whole development of the nation. The fact that the
attitude of most French communists has a political complexion — this
is, on the other hand, countered by the fact that very many French
socialists have abstracted completely from politics — causes our
author to infer that the French “have arrived at communism by way
of politics”, by way of their political development. This proposition,
which has a very wide circulation in Germany, does not imply that
the writer has any knowledge either of politics, particularly of
French political developments, or of communism; it only shows that
he considers politics to be an independent sphere of activity, which
develops in its own independent way, a belief he shares with all
ideologists.

Another catchword of the true socialists is “true property”, “true,
personal property”, “real”, “social”, “living”, “natural”, etc., etc.,
property, whereas it is very typical that they refer to private property
as “ so-called property”. The Saint-Simonists were the first to adopt

a Gold is but a chimera. From Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (libretto
Eugene Scribe and Germain Delavigne), Act I, Scene 7. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 469

this manner of speaking, as we have already pointed out in the first
volume; but they never lent it this German metaphysical-mysterious
form; it was with them at the beginning of the socialist movement to
some extent justified as a counter to the stupid clamour of the
bourgeoisie.3 The end to which most of the Saint-Simonists came
shows at any rate the ease with which this “true property” is again
resolved into “ordinary private property”.

If one takes the antithesis of communism to the world of private
property in its crudest form, i.e., in the most abstract form in which
the real conditions of that antithesis are ignored, then one is faced
with the antithesis of property and lack of property. The abolition of
this antithesis can be viewed as the abolition of either the one side or
the other; either property is abolished, in which case universal lack of
property or destitution results, or else the lack of property is abol-
ished, which means the establishment of true property. In reality,
the actual property-owners stand on one side and the propertyless
communist proletarians on the other. This opposition becomes
keener day by day and is rapidly driving to a crisis. If, then, the theo-
retical representatives of the proletariat wish their literary activity to
have any practical effect, they must first and foremost insist that all
phrases are dropped which tend to dim the realisation of the
sharpness of this opposition, all phrases which tend to conceal this
opposition and may even give the bourgeois a chance to approach
the communists for safety’s sake on the strength of their philan-
thropic enthusiasms. All these bad qualities are, however, to be
found in the catchwords of the true socialists and particularly in
“true property”. Of course, we realise that the communist move-
ment cannot be impaired by a few German phrase-mongers. But in a
country like Germany — where philosophic phrases have for cen-
turies exerted a certain power, and where, moreover, communist
consciousness is anyhow less keen and determined because class
contradictions do not exist in as acute a form as in other nations — it
is, nevertheless, necessary to resist all phrases which obscure and
dilute still further the realisation that communism is totally opposed
to the existing world order.

This theory of true property conceives real private property, as it
has hitherto existed, merely as a semblance, whereas it views the
concept abstracted from this real property as the truth and reality of
the semblance; it is therefore ideological all through. All it does is to
give clearer and more precise expression to the ideas of the petty

a See this volume, pp. 231-32. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

bourgeois; for their benevolent endeavours and pious wishes aim
likewise at the abolition of the lack of property.

In this essay we have had yet further evidence of the narrowly
national outlook which underlies the alleged universalism and
cosmopolitanism of the Germans.

The land belongs to the Russians and French,

The English own the sea.

But we in the airy realm of dreams
Hold sovereign mastery.

Our unity is perfect here,

Our power beyond dispute;

The other folk in solid earth
Have meanwhile taken root.3

With infinite self-confidence the Germans confront the other
peoples with this airy realm of dreams, the realm of the “essence of
man”, claiming that it is the consummation and the goal of all world
history; in every sphere they regard their dreamy fantasies as a final
verdict on the actions of other nations; and because everywhere their
lot is merely to look on and be left high and dry they believe
themselves called upon to sit in judgment on the whole world while
history attains its ultimate purpose in Germany. We have already
observed several times that the complement of this inflated and
extravagant national pride is practical activity of the pettiest kind,
worthy of shopkeepers and artisans. National narrow-mindedness is
everywhere repellent. In Germany it is positively odious, since,
together with the illusion that the Germans are superior to
nationality and to all real interests, it is held in the face of those
nations which openly confess their national limitations and their
dependence upon real interests. It is, incidentally, true of every
nation that obstinate nationalism is now to be found only among the
bourgeoisie and their writers.

B. “SOCIALISTISCHE BAUSTEINE”b

RHEINISCHE JAHRBUCHER, P. 155 ET SEQ.

In this essay the reader is first of all prepared for the more
difficult truths of true socialism by a belletristic and poetic pro-
logue. The prologue opens by proclaiming “happiness” to be the

a Heinrich Heine, Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen, Caput VII. — Ed.
“Cornerstones of Socialism” — title of an article by Rudolph Matthai. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 471

“ultimate goal of all endeavour, all movements, of all the arduous
and untiring exertions of past millenniums”. In a few brief strokes,
so to speak, a history of the struggle for happiness is sketched for us:

“When the foundations of the old world crumbled, the human heart with all its
yearning took refuge in the other world, to which it transferred its happiness”
(P- 156).

Hence all the bad luck of the terrestrial world. In recent times man
has bidden farewell to the other world and our true socialist now
asks:

“Can man greet the earth once more as the land of his happiness? Does he once
more recognise earth as his original home? Why then should he still keep life and
happiness apart? Why does he not break down the last barrier which cleaves earthly
life into two hostile halves?” (ibid.).

“Land of my most blissful feelings!” etc.

He now invites “Man” to take a walk, an invitation which “Man”
readily accepts. “Man” enters the realm of “free nature” and utters,
among other things, the following tender effusions of a true
socialist’s heart:2

“.!. gay flowers ... tall and stately oaks ... their satisfaction, their happiness lie in
their life, their growth and their blossoming ... an infinite multitude of tiny creatures
in the meadows ... forest birds ... a mettlesome troop of young horses ... I see” (says
“man” ) “that these creatures neither know nor desire any other happiness than that
which lies for them in the expression and the enjoyment of their lives. When night
falls, my eyes behold a countless host of worlds which revolve about each other
in infinite space according to eternal laws. I see in their revolutions a unity of life,
movement and happiness” (p. 157).

“Man” could also observe a great many other things in nature,
e.g., the bitterest competition among plants and animals; he could
see, for example, in the plant world, in his “forest of tall and stately
oaks”, how these tall and stately capitalists consume the nutriment of
the tiny shrubs, which might well complain: terra, aqua, aere et igni
interdicti sumusb; he could observe the parasitic plants, the ideologists
of the vegetable world, he could further observe that there is open
warfare between the “forest birds” and the “infinite multitude of
tiny creatures”, between the grass of his “meadows” and the
“mettlesome troop of young horses”. He could see in his “countless
host of worlds” a whole heavenly feudal monarchy complete with
tenants and satellites, a few of which, e.g., the moon, lead a very poor
life aere et aqua interdicti; a feudal system in which even the homeless

a Paraphrase of the title of Wilhelm Wackenroder’s book Herzensergiessungen
eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. — Ed.

We are banned from earth, water, air and fire. — Ed.

1 7—2086

472

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

vagabonds, the comets, have been apportioned their station in life
and in which, for example, the shattered asteroids bear witness to
occasional unpleasant scenes, while the meteors, those fallen angels,
creep shamefaced through the “infinite space”, until they find
somewhere or other a modest lodging. In the further distance, he
would come upon the reactionary fixed stars.

“All these beings find their happiness, the satisfaction and the enjoyment of their
life in the exercise and manifestation of the vital energies with which nature has
endowed them.”

That is, “man” considers that in the interaction of natural bodies
and the manifestation of their forces these natural bodies find their
happiness, etc.

“Man” is now reproached by our true socialist with his discord:

“Did not man too spring from the primeval world, is he not a child of nature, like
all other creatures? Is he not formed of the same materials, is he not endowed with the
same general energies and properties that animate all things} Why does he still seek his
earthly happiness in an earthly beyond?” (p. 158).

“ The same general energies and properties” which man has in
common with “all things”, are cohesion, impenetrability, volume,
gravity, etc., which can be found set out in detail on the first page of
any textbook of physics. It is difficult to see how one can construe
this as a reason why man should not “seek his happiness in an earthly
beyond”. However, he admonishes man as follows:

“Consider the lilies of the field.”

Yes, consider the lilies of the field, how they are eaten by goats,
transplanted by “man” into his buttonhole, how they are crushed
beneath the immodest embraces of the dairymaid and the donkey-
driver!

“Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin: and thy
Heavenly Father feedeth them.”3

Go thou and do likewise!

After learning in this fashion of the unity of “man” with “all
things”, we now learn how he differs from “all things”.

“But man knows himself, he is conscious of himself. Whereas in other beings, the
instincts and forces of nature manifest themselves in isolation and unconsciously, they
are united in man and become conscious ... his nature is the mirror of all nature, which
recognises itself in him. Well then! If nature recognises itself in me, then I recognise
myself in nature. I see in its life my own life [...]. We are thus giving living expression
to that with which nature has imbued us” (p. 158).

Cf. Matthew 6 : 28, 26 .—Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 473

This whole prologue is a model of ingenuous philosophic
mystification. The true socialist proceeds from the thought that the
dichotomy of life and happiness must cease. To prove this thesis he
summons the aid of nature presupposing that this dichotomy does
not exist in nature and from this he deduces that since man, too, is a
natural body and has the properties which such bodies generally
possess, this dichotomy ought not to exist for him either. Hobbes had
much better reasons for invoking nature as a proof of his bellum
omnium contra omnes ,a and Hegel, on whose construction our true
socialist depends, for perceiving in nature the cleavage, the slovenly
period of the Absolute Idea, and even calling the animal the concrete
anguish of God. After shrouding nature in mystery, our true socialist
shrouds human consciousness in mystery too, by making it the
“mirror” of this mystified nature. Of course, when the manifestation
of consciousness ascribes to nature the mental expression of a pious
wish about human affairs, it is self-evident that consciousness will
only be the mirror in which nature contemplates itself. That “man”
has to abolish in his own sphere the cleavage, which is assumed to be
non-existent in nature, is now proved by reference to man in his
quality as a mere passive mirror in which nature becomes aware of
itself; just as it was earlier proved by reference to man as a mere
natural body. But let us inspect the last proposition more closely; all
the nonsense of these arguments is concentrated in it.

The first fact asserted is that man possesses self-consciousness.
The instincts and energies of individual natural beings are
transformed into the instincts and forces of “Nature”, which then, as
a matter of course, “are manifested” in isolation in these individual
beings. This mystification was needed in order later to effect a
unification of these instincts and forces of “Nature” in the human
self-consciousness. Thereby the self-consciousness of man is, of
course, transformed into the self-consciousness of nature within
him. This mystification is apparently resolved in the following way:
in order to pay nature back for finding its self-consciousness in man,
man seeks his, in turn, in nature — a procedure which enables him, of
course, to find nothing in nature except what he has imputed to it by
means of the mystification described above.

He has now arrived safely at the point from which he originally
started, and this way of turning round on one’s heel is now called in
Germany — development.

After this prologue comes the real exposition of true socialism.

J Thomas Hobbes, Elementa philosophica. De cive. Praefatio ad lectores. — Ed.

17*

474

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

FIRST CORNERSTONE

Page 160: “Saint-Simon said to his disciples on his death-bed: ‘My whole life can be
expressed in one thought: all men must be assured the freest development of their
natural capacities.’ Saint-Simon was a herald of socialism.”

This statement is now treated according to the true socialist
method described above and combined with that mystification of
nature which we saw in the prologue.

“Nature as the basis of all life is a unity which proceeds from itself and returns to
itself, which embraces the immense multifariousness of its phenomena and apart from
which nothing exists” (p. 158).

We have seen how one contrives to transform the different natural
bodies and their mutual relationships into multifarious “phenome-
na” of the secret essence of this mysterious “unity”. The only new
element in this sentence is that nature is first called “the basis of all
life”, and immediately afterwards we are informed that “apart from
it nothing exists”; according to this it embraces “life” as well and
cannot merely be its basis.

After these portentous words, there follows the pivotal point of the
whole essay:

“Every one of these phenomena, every individual life, exists and develops only
through its antithesis, its struggle with the external world, and it is based upon its
interaction with the totality of life, with which it is in turn by its nature linked in a whole,
the organic unity of the universe ” (pp. 158, 159).

This pivotal sentence is further elucidated as follows:

“The individual life finds, on the one hand, its foundation, its source and its
subsistence in the totality of life; on the other hand, the totality of life in continual
struggle with the individual life strives to consume and to absorb it” (p. 159).

Since this statement applies to every individual life, “therefore”, it
can be, and is, applied to men as well:

“Man can therefore only develop in and through the totality of life” (No. I, ibid.).

Conscious individual life is now contrasted with unconscious
individual life; human society with natural life in general; and then
the sentence which we quoted last is repeated in the following form:

“By reason of my nature, it is only in and through community with other men that
I can develop, achieve self-conscious enjoyment of my life and attain happiness”
(No. II, ibid.).

This development of the individual in society is now discussed in
the same way as “individual life” in general was treated above:

“In society, too, the opposition of individual life and life in general becomes the
condition of conscious human development. It is through perpetual struggle, through

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 475

perpetual reaction against society, which confronts me as a restricting force, that I
achieve self-determination and freedom, without which there is no happiness. My life
is a continuous process of liberation, a continuous battle with and victory over the
conscious and unconscious external world, in order to subdue it and use it to enjoy my
life. The instinct of self-preservation, the striving for my own happiness, freedom
and satisfaction, these are consequently natural, i.e., reasonable, expressions of life”
(ibid.).

Further:

“I demand, therefore, from society that it should afford me the possibility of winning
from it my satisfaction, my happiness, that it should provide a battlefield for my
bellicose spirit. Just as the individual plant demands soil, warmth and sun, air and rain
for its growth, so that it may bear leaves, blossoms and fruit, man too desires to find in
society the conditions for the all-round development and satisfaction of all his needs,
inclinations and capacities. It must offer him the possibility of winning his happiness.
How he will use that chance, what he will make of himself, of his life, depends upon
him, upon his individuality. I alone can determine my happiness” (pp. 159, 160).

There follows, as the conclusion of the whole argument, the
statement by Saint-Simon which is quoted at the beginning of this
section. The Frenchman’s idea has thus been vindicated by German
science. What does this vindication consist in?

The true socialist has already earlier imputed various ideas to
nature which he would like to see realised in human society. While
formerly it was the individual human being, whom he made the
mirror of nature, it is now society as a whole. A further conclusion
can now be drawn about human society from the ideas imputed to
nature. Since the author does not discuss the historical development
of society, contenting himself with this meagre analogy, it remains
incomprehensible why society should not always have been a true
image of nature. The phrases about society, which confronts the
individual in the shape of a restricting force, etc., are therefore
relevant to every form of society. It is quite natural that a few
inconsistencies should have crept into this interpretation of society.
Thus he must now admit that a struggle is waged in nature, in
contrast to the harmony described in the prologue. Society, the
“totality of life”, is conceived by our author not as the interaction of
the constituent “individual lives”, but as a distinct existence, and
this moreover separately interacts with these “individual lives”. If
there is any reference to real affairs in all this it is the illusion of the
independence of the state in relation to private life and the belief in
this apparent independence as something absolute. But as a matter
of fact, neither here nor anywhere in the whole essay is it a question
of nature and society at all; it is merely a question of the two
categories, individuality and universality, which are given various

476

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

names and which are said to form a contradiction, the reconciliation
of which would be highly desirable.

From the vindication of “individual life” as opposed to the
“totality of life” it follows that the satisfaction of needs, the
development of capacities, self-love, etc., are “natural, reasonable
expressions of life”. From the conception of society as an image of
nature, it follows that in all forms of society existing up to now, the
present included, these expressions of life have attained full maturity
and are recognised as justified.

But we suddenly learn on page 159 that “in our present-day
society” these reasonable, natural expressions of life are neverthe-
less “so often repressed” and “usually only for that reason do they
degenerate into an unnaturalness, malformation, egoism, vice, etc.”

And so, since society does not, after all, correspond to its
prototype, nature, the true socialist “demands” that it should
conform to nature and justifies his claim by adducing the plant as an
example — a most unfortunate example. In the first place, the plant
does not “demand” of nature all the conditions of existence
enumerated above; unless it finds them already present it never
becomes a plant at all; it remains a grain of seed. Moreover, the state
of the “leaves, blossoms and fruit” depends to a great extent on the
“soil”, the “warmth” and so on, the climatic and geological
conditions of its growth. Far from “demanding” anything, the plant
is seen to depend utterly upon the actual conditions of existence;
nevertheless, it is upon this alleged demand that our true socialist
bases his own claim for a form of society which shall conform to his
individual “peculiarity”. The demand for a true socialist society is
based on the imaginary demand of a coco-nut palm that the “totality
of life” should furnish it with “soil, warmth, sun, air and rain” at the
North Pole.

This claim of the individual on society is not deduced from the real
development of society but from the alleged relationship of the
metaphysical characters — individuality and universality. You have
only to interpret single individuals as representatives, embodiments
of individuality, and society as the embodiment of universality, and
the whole trick is done. And at the same time Saint-Simon’s
statement about the free development of the capacities has been
correctly expressed and placed upon its true ioundation. This
correct expression consists in the absurd statement that the
individuals forming society want to preserve their “peculiarity”,
want to remain as they are, while they demand of society a
transformation which can only proceed from a transformation of
themselves.

The •German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 477

SECOND CORNERSTONE

“You’ve forgotten the rest of the charming refrain?

Well, just give it up and start over again!”3

“Infinite in their variety all individual w

Bemgs as1 unrty1 taken together are* World Organism” (p. 160).

And so we find ourselves thrown back again to the beginning of
the essay and have to go through the whole comedy of individual life
and totality of life for the second time. Once more we are initiated
into the deep mystery of the interaction of these two lives, restaure a
neuf by the introduction of the new term “polar relationship” and the
transformation of the individual life into a mere symbol, an “image”
of the totality of life. Like a kaleidoscopic picture this essay is
composed of reflections of itself, a method of argument common to
all true socialists. Their approach to their arguments is similar to
that of the cherry-seller who was selling her wares below cost price,
working on the correct economic principle that it is the quantity sold
that matters. As regards true socialism, this is the more essential
because its cherries were rotten before they were ripe.

A few examples of this self-reflection follow:

Cornerstone No. I, pp. 158, 159.

“ Every individual life exists and develops
only through its antithesis ... is based upon
its interaction with the totality of life,

“With which it is in turn, by its
nature, linked in a whole.

“Organic unity of the universe.

“The individual life finds, on the one
hand, its foundation, its source and its
subsistence in the totality of life,

“On the other hand, the totality of
life in continual struggle with the indi-
vidual life strives to consume it.

“Therefore (p. 159):

“Human society is to conscious ... life
what unconscious universal life in gener-
al is to the unconscious individual life.

Cornerstone No. II, pp. 160, 161.

“ Every individual life exists and de-
velops in and through the totality of life',
the totality of life only exists and
develops in and through the individual
life.” (Interaction.!

“The individual life develops ... as a
part of life in general.

“The world organism is combined
unity.

“Which” (the totality of life) “be-
comes the soil and subsistence of its” (the
individual life’s) “development ... that
each is founded upon the other....

“That thev struggle against one
another and oppose one another.

“It follows (p. 161):

“That conscious individual life is also
conditioned by the conscious totality of
life and” ... (vice versa).

a The refrain of a German nursery song. — Ed.

478

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“7 can only develop in and through
community with other men.... In society,
too, the opposition of individual life and
life in general becomes”, etc....

“Nature ... is a unity ... which em-
braces the immense multifariousness of
its phenomena.”

“The individual human being develops
only in and through society, society”, vice
versa, etc....

“Society is a unity which embraces
and comprises the multifariousness of in-
dividual human development.”

But our author is not satisfied with this kaleidoscopic display. He
goes on to repeat his artless remarks about individuality and
universality in yet another form. He first puts forward these few arid
abstractions as absolute principles and then concludes that the same
relationship must recur in the real world. Even this gives him the
chance of saying everything twice under the guise of making
deductions, in abstract form and, when he is drawing his conclusion,
in seemingly concrete form. Then, however, he sets about varying
the concrete names which he has given to his two categories.
Universality appears variously as nature, unconscious totality of life,
conscious ditto, life in general, world organism, all-embracing
unity, human society, community, organic unity of the universe,
universal happiness, common weal, etc., and individuality appears
under the corresponding names of unconscious and conscious
individual life, individual happiness, one’s own welfare, etc. In
connection with each of these names we are obliged to listen to the
selfsame phrases which have already been applied often enough to
individuality and universality.

The second cornerstone contains, therefore, nothing which was
not already contained in the first. But since the words egalite,
solidarity, unite des interets are used by the French socialists, our
author attempts to fashion them into “cornerstones” of true
socialism by turning them into German.

“As a conscious member of society I recognise every other member as a being
different from myself, confronting me and at the same time supported by and derived
from the primary common basis of existence and equal to me. I recognise every one of
my fellow-men as opposed to me by reason of his particular nature, yet equal to me
by reason of his general nature. The recognition of human equality, of the right of
every man to existence, depends therefore upon the consciousness that human
nature is common to all; in the same way, love, friendship, justice and all the social
virtues are based upon the feeling of natural human affinity and unity. If up to now
these have been termed obligations and have been imposed upon men, then in a
society founded upon the consciousness of man’s inward nature, i.e., upon reason and
not upon external compulsion, they will become free, natural expressions of life. In a
society which conforms to nature, i.e., to reason, the conditions of existence must
accordingly be equal for all its members, i.e., must be general” (pp. 161. 162).

The author displays a marked ability for first putting forward a
proposition in assertive fashion and then legitimising it as a conse-

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 479

quence of itself by inserting an accordingly, a consequently, etc. He is
equally skilful at incidentally smuggling into his peculiar deductions
traditional socialistic statements by the use of “if they have”, “if it
is” — “then they must”, “then it will become”, etc.

In the first cornerstone, we saw, on the one hand, the individual
and, on the other, universality which confronted him as society. This
antithesis now reappears in another form, the individual now being
divided within himself into a particular and a general nature. From
the general nature of the individual, conclusions are drawn about
“human equality” and community. Those conditions of life which
are common to men thus appear here as a product of “the essence of
man”, of nature , whereas they, just as much as the consciousness of
equality, are historical products. Not content with this, the author
substantiates this equality by stating that it rests entirely “on the
primary common basis of existence”. We learned in the prologue,
p. 158, that man “is formed of the same materials and is endowed
with the same general energies and properties that animate all
things”. We learned in the first cornerstone that nature is “the basis
of all life”, and so, the “primary common basis of existence”. Our
author has, therefore, far outstripped the French since, being “a
conscious member of society”, he has not only demonstrated the
equality of men with one another; he has also demonstrated their
equality with every flea, every wisp of straw, every stone.

We should be only too pleased to believe that “all the social
virtues” of our true socialist are based “upon the feeling of natural
human affinity and unity”, even though feudal bondage, slavery and
all the social inequalities of every age have also been based upon this
“natural affinity”. Incidentally, “natural human affinity” is an
historical product which is daily changed at the hands of men; it has
always been perfectly natural, however inhuman and contrary to
nature it may seem, not only in the judgment of “Man”, but also of a
later revolutionary generation.

We learn further, quite by chance, that present-day society is
based upon “external compulsion”. By “external compulsion” the
true socialists do not understand the restrictive material conditions
of life of given individuals. They see it only as the compulsion
exercised by the state, in the form of bayonets, police and cannons,
which far from being the foundation of society, are only a
consequence of its structure. This question has already been
discussed in Die heilige Familie and also in the first volume of this
work.

The socialist opposes to present-day society, which is “based
upon external compulsion”, the ideal of true society, which is based

480

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

upon the “consciousness of man’s inward nature, i.e., upon reason”.
It is based, that is, upon the consciousness of consciousness, upon the
thought of thought. The true socialist does not differ from the
philosophers even in his choice of terms. He forgets that the “inward
nature” of men, as well as their “consciousness” of it, “i.e.”, their
“reason”, has at all times been an historical product and that even
when, as he believes, the society of men was based “upon external
compulsion”, their “inward nature” corresponded to this “external
compulsion”.

There follow, on page 163, individuality and universality with
their usual retinue, in the form of individual and public welfare. You
may find similar explanations of their mutual relationship in any
handbook of political economy under the heading of competition
and also, though better expressed, in Hegel.

For example, Rheinische Jahrbiicher, p. 163:

“By furthering the public welfare, I further my own welfare, and by furthering my
own welfare, I further the public welfare.”

Cf. Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie, p. 248 (1833):

“In furthering my ends, I further the universal, and this in turn furthers my
ends.”

Compare also Rechtsphilosophie, p. 323 et seq., about the relation
of the citizen to the state.

“Therefore, as a final consequence, we have the conscious unity of the individual
life with the totality of life, harmony” ( Rheinische Jahrbiicher, p. 163).

“As a final consequence”, that is to say, of

“this polar relationship between the individual and the general life, which consists in
the fact that sometimes the two clash and oppose one another, while at other times, the
one is the condition and the basis of the other”.

The “final consequence” of this is at most the harmony of
disharmony with harmony; and all that follows from the constant
repetition of these familiar phrases is the author’s belief that his
fruitless wrestling with the categories of individuality and univer-
sality is the appropriate form in which social questions should be
solved.

The author concludes with the following flourish:

“ Organic society has as its basis universal equality and develops, through the opposition of
the individuals to the universal, towards unrestricted concord, towards the unity of
individual with universal happiness, towards social” (!) “harmony of society” (!!), “which is
the reflection of universal harmony ” (p. 164).

It is modesty indeed to call this sentence a “cornerstone”. It is the
primal rock upon which the whole of true socialism is founded.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism 481

THIRD CORNERSTONE

“Man’s struggle with nature is based upon the polar opposition of my particular
life to, and its interaction with, the world of nature in general. When this struggle
appears as conscious activity, it is termed labour" (p. 164).

Is not, on the contrary, the idea of “polar opposition” based upon
the observation of a struggle between men and nature? First of all, an
abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is
based upon the abstraction. A very cheap method to produce the
semblance of being profound and speculative in the German
manner.

For example:

Fact : The cat eats the mouse.

Reflection: Cat — nature, mouse — nature, consumption of mouse by
cat=consumption of nature by nature = self-consumption of nature.

Philosophic presentation of the fact: Devouring of the mouse by the cat
is based upon the self-consumption of nature.

Having thus obscured man’s struggle with nature, the writer goes
on to obscure man’s conscious activity in relation to nature, by
describing it as the manifestation of this mere abstraction from the
real struggle. The profane word labour is finally smuggled in as the
result of this process of mystification. It is a word which our true
socialist has had on the tip of his tongue from the start, but which he
dared not utter until he had legitimised it in the appropriate way.
Labour is constructed from the mere abstract idea of Man and
nature; it is thereby defined in a way which is equally appropriate
and inappropriate to all stages in the development of labour.

“ Therefore, labour is any conscious activity on the part of man whereby he tries to
acquire dominion over nature in an intellectual and material sense, so that he may
utilise it for the conscious enjoyment of his life and for his intellectual or bodily
satisfaction” (ibid.).

We shall only draw attention to the brilliant deduction:

“When this struggle appears as conscious activity, it is termed labour — th ere fore
labour is any conscious activity on the part of man”, etc.

We owe this profound insight to the “polar opposition”.

The reader will recall Saint-Simon’s statement concerning litre
developpement de toutes les facultes a mentioned above, and also
remember that Fourier wished to see the present travail repugnant
replaced by travail attrayant.b We owe to the “polar opposition” the

J Free development of all capacities. — Ed.

b “Repellent labour” replaced by "attractive labour” (Charles Fourier, Nouveau
mon de industriel). — Ed.

482

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

following philosophic vindication and explanation of these proposi-
tions:

“But since” (the “but” is meant to indicate that there is no connection here) “for
life every manifestation, exercise and expression of its forces ar\d faculties should be
a source of enjoyment and satisfaction, it follows that labour should itself be a
manifestation and development of human capacities and should be a source of
enjoyment, satisfaction and happiness. Consequently, labour must itself become a
free expression of life and so a source of enjoyment” (ibid.).

Here we are shown what we were promised in the preface to the
Rheinische Jahrbucher, namely, “how far German social science differs
in its development up to the present from French and English social
science” and what it means “to present the doctrine of communism
in a scientific form”.

It would be a lengthy and boring procedure to expose every logical
lapse which occurs in the course of these few lines. But let us first
consider the offences against formal logic.

To prove that labour, an expression of life, should be a source of
enjoyment, it is assumed that life should afford enjoyment in all its
expressions. From this the conclusion is drawn that life should he a
source of enjoyment also in its expression as labour. Not satisfied
with this periphrastic transformation of a postulate into a conclusion,
the author draws a false conclusion. From the fact that “for life every
manifestation should be a source of enjoyment”, he deduces that
labour, which is one of these manifestations of life, “should itself be a
manifestation and development of human capacities”, that is to say,
of life once again. Hence it ought to be what it already is. How could
labour ever be anything but a “manifestation of human capacities”?
But he does not stop there. Because labour should be so, it “ must
consequently ” be so, or still better: betause labour “should be a
manifestation and development of human capacities”, it must
consequently become something completely different, namely, “a free
expression of life”, which did not enter into the question at all before
this. And whereas earlier the postulate of labour as enjoyment was
directly deduced from the postulate of the enjoyment of life, the
former postulate is now put forward as a consequence of the new
postulate of “free expression of life in labour”.

As far as the content of the proposition is concerned, one cannot
quite see why labour has not always been what it ought to be, why it
must now become what it ought to be, or why it should become
something which up to now it was not bound to be. But, of course, up
to now the essence of man and the polar opposition of man and
nature were not properly explained.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Philosophy of True Socialism

483

A “scientific vindication” of the communist view about the
common ownership of the products of labour follows:

“But” (the recurrent “but” has the same meaning as the previous one) “the
product of labour must serve at one and the same time the happiness of the individual,
of the labouring individual, and the general happiness. This is effected by reason of
the fact that all social activities are complementary and reciprocal” (ibid.).

This statement is merely a copy of what any political economy has
to say in praise of competition and the division of labour; except that
the argument has been weakened by the introduction of the word
“happiness”.

Finally, we are given a philosophic vindication of the French
organisation of labour:

“Labour as a free activity, which is enjoyable, affords satisfaction and at the same
time serves the common weal, is the basis of the organisation of labour” (p.165).

But since labour should and must become a free activity “which is
enjoyable”, etc., and therefore this state of affairs has not yet been
reached, one would have expected on the contrary the organisation of
labour to be the basis of “labour as an enjoyable activity”. But the
concept of labour as such an activity is quite sufficient [for the writer].

At the end of the essay the author believes to have reached
“results”.

These “cornerstones” and “results”, together with those other
granite boulders which are to be found in the Einundzwanzig Bogen,
the Burgerbuch and the Neue Anekdota ,127 form the rock upon which
true socialism, alias German social philosophy, will build its church.3

We shall have occasion to listen to a few of the hymns, a few of the
fragments of the cantique allegorique hebraique et mystiqueb which are
chanted in this church.

a Cf. Matthew 16: 18.— Ed.

b Evariste Parny, La guerre des dieux. Chant premier. — Ed.

KARL GRUN:

DIE SOZIALE BEWEGUNG IN FRANKREICH UND BELGIEN 3
(DARMSTADT 1845)

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TRUE SOCIALISM 128

“In sooth, if it were not a matter of discussing the whole horde of them ... we
should probably throw down our pen.... And now, with that same arrogance, it”
(Mundt’s Geschichte der Gesellschaft ) “appears before a wide circle of readers, before
that public which seizes voraciously upon everything displaying the word social
because a sure instinct tells it what secrets of future times are hidden in this little word.
Hence a double responsibility rests on the writer and he deserves double reproof, if he
sets to work inexpertly!”

“We shall not reproach Herr Mundt with not knowing anything of the actual
achievements of French and English social literature apart from what Herr L. Stein
has revealed to him. When it appeared, Stein’s bookb was worthy of note.... But to coin
phrases nowadays ... about Saint-Simon, to call Bazard and Enfantin the two branches
of Saint-Simonism, to follow this up with Fourier and to repeat idle chit-chat about
Proudhon, etc.!... And yet we would willingly overlook this if he had only portrayed
the genesis of social ideas in a new and original way.”

With this haughty and Rhadamanthine pronouncement Herr
Griin begins a review (in the Neue Anekdota, pp. 122, 123) of Mundt’s
Geschichte der Gesellschaft.

The reader will be amazed at the artistic talent shown by Herr
Griin, who actually gives, in this guise, a criticism of his own book,
which at that time was not yet born.

We observe in Herr Griin a fusion of true socialism with
Young-German literary pretensions129 — a highly diverting spectacle.
The book mentioned above is in the form of letters to a lady, from
which the reader may surmise that here the profound divinities of
true socialism are garlanded with the roses and myrtles of “young
literature”. Let us hasten to pluck a few roses:

“The Carmagnole was running through my head ... in any case it is terrible that the
Carmagnole should be permitted to take breakfast in the head of a German writer,
even if not to take up permanent quarters there” (p. 3).

a The Social Movement in France and Belgium. — Ed.
h Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

485

“If I had old Hegel here, I should collar him: What! So nature is the otherness of
mind? What! You dullard!” (p. 11).

“Brussels is to some extent a reproduction of the French Convention; it has its
parties of the Mountain and the Valley” (p. 24).

“The Liineburg Heath of politics” (p. 80).

“Gay, poetic, inconsistent, fantastic chrysalis” (p. 82).

“Restoration liberalism, the groundless cactus, which as a parasite coiled round the
seats in the Chamber of Deputies” (pp. 87, 88).

That the cactus is neither “groundless”, nor a “parasite”, and that
“gay”, “poetic” or “inconsistent” “chrysalises” or pupae do not
exist, does not detract from these lovely images.

“Amid this sea” (of newspapers and journalists in the Cabinet Montpensier130)
“I myself, however, feel like a second Noah, despatching his doves to see if he can
possibly build a dwelling or plant a vineyard anywhere or come to a reasonable
agreement with the infuriated Gods” (p. 259).

No doubt this refers to Herr Grun’s activity as a newspaper
correspondent.

“Camille Desmoulins was a human being. The Constituent Assembly was composed
of philistines. Robespierre was a virtuous magnetiser. Modern history, in
a word, is a life-and-death struggle against the shopkeepers and the magnetisers!!!”

(p. HD.

“Happiness is a plus, but a plus to the nth power” (p. 203).

Hence, happiness = + n, a formula which can only be found in the
aesthetic mathematics of Herr Griin.

“Organisation of labour, what is it? And the peoples replied to the Sphinx with
the voices of a thousand newspapers.... France sings the strophe, Germany the
antistrophe, old mystic Germany” (p. 259).

“North America is even more distasteful to me than the Old World because its
shopkeeping egoism has on its cheeks the bloom of impertinent health ... because
everything there is so superficial, so rootless, I might almost say so provincial.... You
call America the New World; it is the oldest of all Old Worlds; our worn-out clothes set
the fashion there” (pp. 101, 324).

So far we were only aware that unworn stockings of German
manufacture were worn there; although they are of too poor a
quality to set the “fashion”.

“The logically stable security-mongering of these institutions” (p. 461).

Unless these flowers your heart delight
To be a “man” you have no right!3

What wanton grace, what saucy innocence! What heroic wrestling
with aesthetic problems! This nonchalance and originality are
worthy of a Heine!

“ An adaptation of a couplet from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (libretto by
Emanuel Schikaneder), Act II, aria of Sarastro. — Ed.

486

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

We have deceived the reader. Herr Griin’s literary graces are not
an embellishment of the science of true socialism, the science is
merely the padding between these outbursts of literary gossip, and
forms, so to speak, its “social background”.

In an essay by Herr Grim, “Feuerbach und die Socialisten”, the
following remark occurs ( Deutsches Biirgerbuch, p. 74):

“When one speaks of Feuerbach one speaks of the entire work of philosophy
from Bacon of Verulam up to the present; one defines at the same time the ultimate
purpose and meaning of philosophy, one sees man as the final result of world history.
To do so is a more reliable, because a more profound, method of approach than to bring up
wages, competition, the faultiness of constitutions and systems of government.... We
have gained man, man who has divested himself of religion, of moribund thoughts, of
all that is foreign to him, with all their counterparts in the practical world; we have
gained pure, genuine man."

This one proposition is enough to show what kind of “reliability”
and “profundity” one can expect from Herr Grim. He does not
discuss small questions. Equipped with an unquestioning faith in the
conclusions of German philosophy, as formulated by Feuerbach, viz.,
that “man”, “pure, genuine man”, is the ultimate purpose of world
history, that religion is externalised [entausserte] human essence, that
human essence is human essence and the measure of all
things — equipped with all the other truths of German socialism (see
above) — i.e., that money, wage-labour, etc., are also externalisations
[Entausserungen] of human essence, that German socialism is the rea-
lisation of German philosophy and the theoretical truth of foreign
socialism and communism, etc.a — Herr Grim travels to Brussels and
Paris with all the complacency of a true socialist.

The powerful trumpetings of Herr Grim in praise of true
socialism and of German science exceed anything his fellow-
believers have achieved in this respect. As far as these eulogies refer
to true socialism, they are obviously quite sincere. Herr Grim’s
modesty does not permit him to utter a single sentence that has not
already been pronounced by some other true socialist in the
Einundzwanzig Bogen, the Biirgerbuch and the Neue Anekdota. Indeed,
he devotes his whole book to filling in an outline of the French social
movement sketched in the Einundzwanzig Bogen (pp. 74-88) by Hess,
and thereby answering a need expressed in the same work on page
88. b As regards the eulogies to German philosophy, the latter must
value them all the more, seeing how little he knows about it. The

b See this volume, pp. 467-68. — Ed.

See Moses Hess, “Socialismus und Communismus”. — Ed.

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First page of Chapter IV (Volume II) of The German Ideology as published
in the W estphalische Dampfboot No. 8, 1847

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

489

national pride of the true socialists, their pride in Germany as the
land of “man”, of “human essence”, as opposed to the other profane
nationalities, reaches its climax in him. We give below a few samples
of it:

“But I should like to know whether they won’t all have to learn from us, these
French and English, Belgians and North Americans” (p. 28).

He now enlarges upon this.

“The North Americans appear to me thoroughly prosaic and, despite their legal
freedom, it is from us that they will probably have to learn their socialism” (p. 101).

Particularly because they have had, since 1 829, their own socialist
and democratic school,131 against which their economist Cooper was
fighting as long ago as 1830.

“The Belgian democrats! Do you really think that they are half so far advanced as we
Germans are? Why, I have just had a tussle with one of them who considered the
realisation of free humanity to be a chimera!” (p. 28).

The nationality of “man”, of “human essence”, of “humanity”
shows off here as vastly superior to Belgian nationality.

“Frenchmen! Leave Hegel in peace until you understand him.” (We believe that
Lerminief s criticism of the philosophy of law,a however weak it may be, shows more
insight into Hegel than anything which Herr Grim has written either under his own
name or that of “Ernst von der Haide”.) “Try drinking no coffee, no wine for a year;
don’t give way to passionate excitement; let Guizot rule and let Algeria come under
the sway of Morocco” (how is Algeria ever to come under the sway of Morocco, even if
the French were to relinquish it?); “sit in a garret and study the Logik and the
Phanomenologie. And when you come down after a year, lean in frame and red of eye,
and go into the street and stumble over some dandy or town crier, don’t be abashed.
For in the meantime you will have become great and mighty men, your mind will be
like an oak that is nourished by miraculous” (!) “sap; whatever you see will yield up to
you its most secret weaknesses; though you are created spirits, you will nevertheless
penetrate to the heart of nature; your glance will be fatal, your word will move
mountains, your dialectic will be keener than the keenest guillotine. You will present
yourself at the Hotel de Ville — and the bourgeoisie is a thing of the past. You will step
up to the Palais Bourbon — and it collapses. The whole Chamber of Deputies will
disappear into the void. Guizot will vanish, Louis Philippe will fade into an historical
ghost and out of all these forces which you have annihilated there will rise victorious
the absolute idea of free society. Seriously, you can only subdue Hegel by first of all
becoming Hegel yourselves. As I have already remarked — Moor’s beloved can only die
at the hands of Moor”b (pp. 115, 116).

The belletristic aroma of these true socialist statements will be
noticed by everyone. Herr Grim, like all true socialists, does not

a Eugene Lerminier, Philosophic du droit. — Ed.
b Friedrich Schiller, Die R'duber, Act V, Scene 2. — Ed.

490

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

forget to bring up again the old chatter about the superficiality of the
French:

“For I am fated to find the French mind inadequate and superficial, every time
that I come into close contact with it” (p. 371).

Herr Griin does not conceal from us the fact that his book is
intended to glorify German socialism as the criticism of French
socialism:

“The riff-raff of current German literature call our socialist endeavours an
imitation of French perversities. No one has so far considered it worth while to reply
to this. The riff-raff must surely feel ashamed, if they have any sense of shame at all,
when they read this book. It probably never entered their head that German socialism is
a criticism of French socialism, that far from considering the French to be the inventors
of a new Contrat social, it demands that French socialism should make good its deficiencies
by a study of German science. At this moment, an edition of a translation of Feuerbach’s
Wesen des Christenthums is being prepared here in Paris. May their German schooling
do the French much good! Whatever may arise from the economic position of the
country or the constellation of politics in this country, only the humanistic outlook will
ensure a human existence for the future. The Germans, unpolitical and despised as
they are, this nation which is no nation, will have laid the cornerstone of the building
of the future” (p. 353).

Of course, there is no need for a true socialist, absorbed in his
intimacy with “human essence”, to know anything about what “may
arise from the economic position and the political constellation” of a
country.

Herr Griin, as an apostle of true socialism, does not merely, like his
fellow-apostles, boast of the omniscience of the Germans as
compared with the ignorance of the other nations. Utilising his
previous experience as a man of letters, he forces himself, in the
worst globe-trotter manner, upon the representatives of the various
socialist, democratic and communist parties and when he has sniffed
them from all angles, he presents himself to them as the apostle of
true socialism. All that remains for him to do is to teach them, to
communicate to them the profoundest discoveries concerning free
humanity. The superiority of true socialism over the French parties
now assumes the form of the personal superiority of Herr Griin over
the representatives of these parties. Finally, this gives him a chance
not only of utilising the French party leaders as a pedestal for Herr
Griin, but also of talking all sorts of gossip, thereby compensating the
German provincial for the exertion which the more pregnant
statements of true socialism have caused him.

“ Kats pulled a face expressive of plebeian cheerfulness when I assured him of
my complete satisfaction with his speech” (p. 50).

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography 491

Herr Griin lost no time in instructing Kats about French terrorism
and “had the good fortune to win the approval of my new friend”
(p. 51).

His effect on Proudhon was important too, but in a different way.

“I had the infinite pleasure of acting, so to speak, as the tutor of the man whose
acumen has not perhaps been surpassed since Lessing and Kant” (p. 404).

Louis Blanc is merely “his swarthy young friend” (p. 314).

“He asked very eagerly but also very ignorantly about conditions with us. We
Germans know” (?) “French conditions almost as well as the French themselves; at
least we study” (?) “them” (p. 315).

And we learn of “Papa Cabet ” that he “has limitations” (p. 382).
Herr Griin raised a number of questions, and Cabet

“confessed that he had not exactly been able to fathom them. /” (Griin) “had
noticed this long ago; and that, of course, meant an end of everything, especially as it
occurred to me that Cabet’s mission had long ago been fulfilled” (p. 381).

We shall see later how Herr Griin contrives to give Cabet a new
“mission”.

Let us first deal with the outline and the few well-worn general
ideas which form the skeleton of Griin’s book. Both are copied from
Hess, whom Herr Griin paraphrases indeed in the most lordly
fashion. Matters which are quite vague and mystical even in Hess,
but which were originally — in the Einundzwanzig Bogen — worthy of
recognition, and have only become tiresome and reactionary as a
result of their perpetual reappearance in the Biirgerbuch, the Neue
Anekdota and the Rheinische Jahrbiicher, at a time when they were
already out of date, become complete nonsense in Herr Griin’s
hands.

Hess synthesises the development of French socialism and the
development of German philosophy — Saint-Simon and Schelling,
Fourier and Hegel, Proudhon and Feuerbach. Compare, for
example, Einundzwanzig Bogen, pp. 78, 79, a 326, 327b; Neue Anekdota,
pp. 194, 195, 196, 202 ff.c (Parallels between Feuerbach and
Proudhon, e.g., Hess: “Feuerbach is the German Proudhon”, etc.,
Neue Anekdota, p. 202. Griin: “Proudhon is the French Feuerbach”,
p. 404.)

This schematism in the form given it by Hess is all that holds
Griin’s book together. But, of course, Herr Griin does not fail to add
a few literary flourishes to Hess’ propositions. Even obvious

a Moses Hess, “Socialismus und Communismus”. — Ed.
b Moses Hess, “Philosophic der That”. — Ed.

c Moses Hess, “Ueber die sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland”. — Ed.

492

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

blunders on the part of Hess, e.g., that theoretical constructions
form the ‘.‘social background” and the ‘‘theoretical basis” of practical
movements (e.g., Neue Anekdota, p. 192) are copied faithfully by Herr
Grim. (E.g., Griin, p. 264: “The social background of the political
question in the eighteenth century ... was the simultaneous product
of the two philosophic tendencies” — that of the sensationists and
that of the deists.) He copies, too, the opinion that it is only necessary
to put Feuerbach into practice, to apply him to social life, in order to
produce the complete critique of existing society. If one adds the
other critical remarks which Hess directed against French commu-
nism and socialism, for example: “Fourier, Proudhon, etc., did not
get beyond the category of wage-labour” (Burgerbuch, p. 46 and
elsewhere3); “Fourier would like to present new associations of
egoism to the world” ( Neue Anekdota, p. 196); “Even the radical
French communists have not yet risen above the opposition of labour
and enjoyment. They have not yet grasped the unity of production and
consumption, etc.” ( Burgerbuch , p. 43); “Anarchy is the negation of the
concept of political rule” ( Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 77), etc., if one
adds these, one has pocketed the whole of Herr Griin’s critique of
the French. As a matter of fact he had it in his pocket before he went
to Paris. In settling accounts with the French socialists and
communists Herr Griin also obtains great assistance from the various
traditional phrases current in Germany about religion, politics,
nationality, human and inhuman, etc., which have been taken over
by the true socialists from the philosophers. All he has to do is to
hunt everywhere for the words “Man” and “human” and condemn
when he cannot find them. For example: “You are political. Then
you are narrow-minded” (p. 283). In the same way, Herr Griin is
enabled to exclaim: You are national, religious, addicted to political
economy, you have a God — then you are not human, you are
narrow-minded. This is a process which he follows throughout his
book, thereby, of course, providing a thorough criticism of politics,
nationality, religion, etc., and at the same time an adequate
elucidation of the characteristics of the authors criticised and their
connection with social development.

One can see from this that Griin’s fabrication is on a much lower
level than the work by Stein, who at least tried to explain the
connection between socialist literature and the real development of
French society. It need hardly be mentioned that in the book under
discussion, as in the Neue Anekdota, Herr Griin adopts a very grand
and condescending manner towards his predecessor.

a Moses Hess, “Ueber die Noth in unserer Gesellschaft und deren Abhiilfe”. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

493

But has Herr Grim even succeeded in copying correctly what he
has taken over from Hess and others? Has he even incorporated the
necessary material in the outline which he has taken over lock, stock
and barrel in the most uncritical fashion? Has he given a correct and
complete exposition of the individual socialist authors according to
the sources? Surely this is the least one could ask of the man from
whom the North Americans, the French, the English and the
Belgians have to learn, the man who was the tutor of Proudhon and
who perpetually brandishes his German thoroughness before the
eyes of the superficial Frenchmen.

SAINT-SIMONISM

Herr Griin has no first-hand knowledge of a single Saint-Simonian
book. His main sources are: primarily, the much despised Lorenz
Stein; furthermore, Stein’s chief source, L. Reybaud a (in return for
which he proposes to make an example of Herr Reybaud and calls
him a philistine, p. 260; on the same page he pretends that he only
came across Reybaud’s book by chance long after he had settled with
the Saint-Simonists); and occasionally Louis Blanc.b We shall give
direct proofs.

First let us see what Herr Griin writes about Saint-Simon’s life.

The main sources for Saint-Simon’s life are the fragments of his
autobiography in the CEuvres de Saint-Simon, published by Olinde
Rodrigues,c and the Organisateur of May 19th, 1830.d We have,
therefore, all the documents here before us: 1) The original sources;
2) Reybaud, who summarised them; 3) Stein, who utilised Reybaud;
4) Herr Griin’s belletristic edition.

Herr Griin:

“Saint-Simon took part in the American struggle for independence without having
any particular interest in the war itself ; it occurred to him that there was a possibility of
linking the two great oceans ” (p. 84).

Stein, page 143:

“First he entered military service ... and went to America with Bouille.... In this
war, the significance of which he, of course, realised.... The war, as such, he said, did
not interest me, only the purpose of this war, etc.”... “After he had vainly tried to
interest the Viceroy of Mexico in a plan to build a great canal linking the two oceans .”

a Louis Reybaud, Etudes sur les reformateurs ou socialistes modernes. What edition the
authors used is unknown. — Ed.

b Louis Blanc, Histoire de dix ans. — Ed.

‘ “Vie de Saint-Simon ecrite par lui-meme.” — Ed.

“A un Catholique. Sur la vie et le caractere de Saint-Simon.” — Ed.

494

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Reybaud, page 77:

“Soldat de l’independance americaine, il servait sous Washington ... la guerre, en
elle-meme, ne m’interessait pas, dit-il; mais le seul but de la guerre m’interessait
vivement, et cet interet m’en faisait supporter les travaux sans repugnance.” a

Herr Griin only copies the fact that Saint-Simon had “no particu-
lar interest in the war itself”; he omits the whole point— his interest
in the object of the war.

Herr Griin further omits to state that Saint-Simon wanted to win
the Viceroy’s support for his plan and thus turns the plan into a mere
“idea”. He likewise omits to mention that Saint-Simon did this only
“a la paix” ,b the reason being that Stein indicates this merely by
giving the date.

Herr Griin proceeds without a break:

“Later" (when?) “he drafted a plan for a Franco-Dutch expedition to the British
Indies” (Ibid.).

Stein:

“He travelled to Holland in 1785, to draft a plan for a joint Franco-Dutch
expedition against the British colonies in India” (p. 143).

Stein is incorrect here and Griin copies him faithfully. According
to Saint-Simon, the Due de la Vauguyon had induced the States-
General132 to undertake a joint expedition with France to the British
colonies in India. Concerning himself, he merely says that he
“ worked ” ( poursuivi ) “for the execution of this plan for a year”.

Herr Griin:

“When in Spain, he wished to dig a canal from Madrid to the sea” (ibid.).

Saint-Simon wished to dig a canal ? What nonsense! Previously, it
occurred to him to do something, now he wishes to do something. Griin
gets his facts wrong this time not because he copies Stein too
faithfully as he did before, but because he copies him too
superficially.

Stein, page 144:

“Having returned to France in 1786, he visited Spain the very next year to present
to the Government a plan for the completion of a canal from Madrid to the sea.”

Herr Griin could derive the foregoing sentence skimming through
Stein, for with Stein it seems at least as if the plan of construction and

a “A fighter for American independence, he served under Washington.... The war
in itself did not interest me, he said, but I was keenly interested in the object of the war
and this interest induced me to endure its hardships without demur.” — Ed.

b After peace had been made. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

495

the idea of the whole project originated with Saint-Simon. As a
matter of fact, Saint-Simon merely drew up a plan to overcome the
financial difficulties besetting the building of the canal, the
construction of which had been started long ago.

Reybaud :

“Six ans plus tard il proposa au gouvernement espagnol un plan de canal qui
devait etablir une ligne navigable de Madrid a la mer”a (p. 78).

The same mistake as that made by Stein.

Saint-Simon, page XVII:

“Le gouvernement espagnol avait entrepris un canal qui devait faire communiquer
Madrid a la mer; cette entreprise languissait parce que ce gouvernement manquait
d’ouvriers et d’argent; je me concertai avec M. le comte de Cabarrus, aujourd’hui
ministre des finances, et nous presentames au gouvernement le projet suivant” b etc.

Herr Griin:

“In France he speculates on national domains.”

Stein first of all sketches Saint-Simon’s attitude during the
revolution and then passes to his speculation in national domains,
p. 144 et seq. But where Herr Griin has got the nonsensical
expression: “to speculate on national domains”, instead of in na-
tional domains, we can likewise explain by offering the reader the
original:

Reybaud, page 78:

“Revenu a Paris, il tourna son activite vers des speculations, et trafiqua sur les
domaines nationaux.”c

Herr Griin makes the foregoing statement without giving any
explanation. He does not indicate why Saint-Simon should have
speculated in national domains and why this fact, trivial in itself,
should be of importance in his life. For Herr Griin finds it
unnecessary to copy from Stein and Reybaud the fact that
Saint-Simon wished to found a scientific school and a great industrial
undertaking by way of experiment, and that he intended to raise the
necessary capital by these speculations. These are the reasons which
Saint-Simon himself gives for his speculations. ( (Euvres , p. xix.)

a “Six years later, he put before the Spanish Government a plan for the
construction of a canal with the object of establishing a navigable route from Madrid
to the sea.” — Ed.

b “The Spanish Government had undertaken the construction of a canal which
was to link Madrid with the sea; the scheme came to a standstill since the Government
lacked labour and funds; I joined forces with M. le Comte de Cabarrus, now Finance
Minister, and we presented the following plan to the Government.” — Ed.

c “Having returned to Paris, he turned his attention to speculation and dealt in
national domains” (sur les domaines nationaux literally translated means “on national
domains”). — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Herr Griin :

“He marries so that he may be able to act as the host of science, to investigate the
lives of men and exploit them psychologically” (ibid.).

Herr Griin here suddenly skips one of the most important periods
of Saint-Simon’s life — the period during which he studied natural
science and travelled for that purpose. What is the meaning of
marrying to be the host of science? What is the meaning of marrying in
order to exploit men (whom one does not marry) psychologically,
etc.? The whole point is this: Saint-Simon married so that he could
hold a salon and study there among others the men of learning.

Stein puts it in this way, page 149:

“He marries in 1801.... I made use of my married life to study the men of
learning” (cf. Saint-Simon, p. 23).

Since we have now collated it with the original, we are in a position
to understand and explain Herr Griin’s nonsense.

The “psychological exploitation of men ” amounts in Stein and in
Saint-Simon himself merely to the observation of men of learning in
their social life. It was in conformity with his socialist outlook that
Saint-Simon should wish to acquaint himself with the influence of
science upon the personality of men of learning and upon their
behaviour in ordinary life. For Herr Griin this wish turns into a
senseless, vague romantic whim.

Herr Griin:

“He becomes poor” (how, in what way?), “he works as a clerk in a pawnshop at a
salary of a thousand francs a year — he, a count, a scion of Charlemagne; then ” (when
and why?) “he lives on the bounty of a former servant of his; later” (when and why?)
“he tries to shoot himself, is rescued and begins a new life of study and propaganda.
Only now does he write his two chief works."

“He becomes” — “then” — “later” — “now” — such phrases in the
work of Herr Griin are to serve as substitutes for the chronological
order and the connecting links between the various phases of
Saint-Simon’s life.

Stein, pages 156, 157:

“Moreover, there appeared a new and a fearful enemy — actual poverty, which
became more and more oppressive.... After a distressing wait of six months... he
obtained a position — ” (Herr Griin gets even the dash from Stein, but he is cunning
enough to insert it after the pawnshop) “as clerk in the pawnshop” (not, as Herr Griin
artfully writes, “in a pawnshop”, since it is well known that in Paris there is only one
such establishment, and that a public one) “at a salary of a thousand francs a year.
How his fortune fluctuated in those days! The grandson of Louis XIV’s famous
courtier, the heir to a ducal coronet and to an immense fortune, by birth a peer of
France and a Grandee of Spain, a clerk in a pawnshop!”

Now we see the source of Herr Grun’s mistake regarding the
pawnshop; here, in Stein, the expression is appropriate. To

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

497

accentuate his difference from Stein, Grun only calls Saint-Simon a
“count” and a “scion of Charlemagne”. He has the last fact from
Stein (p. 142) and Reybaud (p. 77), but they are wise enough to say
that it was Saint-Simon himself who used to trace his descent from
Charlemagne. Whereas Stein offers positive facts which make
Saint-Simon’s poverty seem surprising under the Restoration, Herr
Grun only expresses his astonishment that a count and an alleged
scion of Charlemagne can possibly find himself in reduced
circumstances.

Stein :

“He lived two more years” (after his attempted suicide) “and perhaps achieved
more during them than during any two decades earlier in his life. The Catechisme des
industriels was completed ” (Herr Grun transforms this completion of a work which had
long been in preparation into: “Only now did he write ”, etc.) “and the Nouveau
christianisme, etc.” (pp. 164, 165).

On page 169 Stein calls these two books “ the two chief works of his
life".

Herr Grun has, therefore, not merely copied the errors of Stein but
has also produced new errors on the basis of obscure passages of Stein.
To conceal his plagiarism, he selects only the outstanding facts; but
he robs them of their factual character by tearing them out of their
chronological context and omitting not only the motives governing
them, but even the most vital connecting links. What we have given
above is, literally, all that Herr Grim has to relate about the life of
Saint-Simon. In his version, the dynamic, active life of Saint-Simon
becomes a mere succession of ideas and events which are of less
interest than the life of any peasant or speculator who lived through
those stormy times in one of the French provinces. After dashing off
this piece of biographical hack-work, he exclaims: “this whole, truly
civilised life!” He does not even shrink from saying (p. 85):
“Saint-Simon’s life is the mirror of Saint-Simonism itself” — as if
Griin’s “life” of Saint-Simon were the mirror of anything except
Herr Griin’s method of patching together a book.

We have spent some time discussing this biography because it is a
classical example of the way in which Herr Grun deals thoroughly with
the French socialists. Just as in this case, to conceal his borrowings,
Herr Grun dashes off passages with an air of nonchalance, omits
facts, falsifies and transposes, we shall watch him later developing all
the symptoms of a plagiarist consumed by inward uneasiness:
artificial confusion, to make comparison difficult; omission of
sentences and words which he does not quite understand, being
ignorant of the original, when quoting from his predecessors; free
invention and embellishment in the form of phrases of indefinite

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

meaning; treacherous attacks upon the very persons whom he is
copying. Herr Grim is indeed so hasty and so precipitous in his
plagiarism that he frequently refers to matters which he has never
mentioned to his readers but which he, as a reader of Stein, carts
round in his own head.

We shall now pass to Griin’s exposition of the doctrine of
Saint-Simon.

* * a

1. LETTRES DUN HABITANT DE GENEVE A SES CONTEMPORAINS

Herr Grim did not gather clearly from Stein the connection
between the plan for supporting the men of learning, outlined in the
work quoted above, and the fantastic appendix to the brochure. He
speaks of this work as if it treated mainly of a new organisation of
society, and ends as follows:

“The spiritual power in the hands of the men of learning, the temporal power in
the hands of the property-owners, the franchise for all” (p, 85, cf. Stein, p. 151,
Reybaud, p. 83).

The sentence: “le pouvoir de nommer les individus appeles a
remplir les fonctions des chefs de l’humanite entre les mains de tout
le monde”,b which Reybaud quotes from Saint-Simon (p. 47) and
which Stein translates in the clumsiest fashion, is reduced by Herr
Grim to “the franchise for all”, which robs it of all meaning.
Saint-Simon is referring to the election of the Newton Cbuncil,134
Herr Grim is referring to elections in general.

Long after dismissing the Lettres in four or five sentences copied
from Stein and Reybaud, and having already spoken of the Nouveau
christianisme, Herr Grim suddenly returns to the Lettres.

“But it is certainly not to be achieved by abstract learning.” (Still less by concrete
ignorance, as we observe.) “For from the standpoint of abstract science, there was
still a cleavage between the ‘property-owners’ and 'everyone'" (p. 87).

Herr Grim forgets that so far he has only mentioned the
“franchise for all” and has not mentioned “everyone”. But since he
finds “tout le monde ” in Stein and Reybaud, he puts “everyone” in
inverted commas. He forgets, moreover, that he has not quoted the
following passage from Stein’s book, that is the passage which would
justify the “/or” in his own sentence:

“He” (Saint-Simon) “ makes a distinction, apart from the sages or the men of
learning, between the proprietaires and tout le monde. It is true that as yet there is no

a Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries. — Ed.

b “The power of nominating the persons who are to act as leaders of humanity
should be in the hands of everyone.” — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

499

clearly marked boundary between these two groups ... but nevertheless, there lies in
that indefinite idea of ‘tout le monde’ the germ of that class towards the understanding
and uplifting of which his theory was later directed, i.e. the classe la plus nombreuse et la
plus pauvre, and in reality, too, this section of the people was at that time only
potentially present” (p. 154).

Stein stresses the fact that Saint-Simon already makes a distinction
between proprietaires and tout le monde, but as yet a very vague one.
Herr Griin twists this so that it gives the impression that Saint-Simon
still makes this distinction. This is naturally a great mistake on the
part of Saint-Simon and is only to be explained by the fact that his
standpoint in the Lettres is that of abstract science. But unfortunately,
in the passage in question, Saint-Simon speaks by no means about
differences in a future order of society, as Herr Griin thinks. He
appeals for subscriptions to mankind as a whole, which, as he finds it,
appears to him to be divided into three classes; not, as Stein believes,
into savants, proprietaires and tout le monde ; but 1) savants and artistes
and all people of liberal ideas; 2) the opponents of innovation, i.e.,
the proprietaires, insofar as they do not join the first class; 3) the
surplus de Vhumanite qui se rallie au mot: Egalite.b These three classes
form tout le monde. Cf. Saint-Simon, Lettres, pp. 21, 22. Since
moreover Saint-Simon says later that he considers his distribution of
power advantageous to all classes, we may take it that in the place
where he speaks of this distribution, p. 47, tout le monde obviously
corresponds to the surplus which rallies around the slogan
“equality”, without, however, excluding the other classes/ Stein is
roughly correct, although he pays no attention to the passage on
pages 21 and 22. Herr Griin, who knows nothing of the original,
clutches at Stein’s slight error and succeeds in making sheer
nonsense of his argument.

We soon come across an even more striking example. We learn
unexpectedly on page 94, where Herr Griin is no longer speaking of
Saint-Simon but of his school:

“In one of his books, Saint-Simon utters the mysterious words: ‘Women will be
admitted, they may even be nominated.’ From this almost barren seed, the whole
gigantic uproar of the emancipation of women has sprung up.”

Of course, if in some work or other Saint-Simon had spoken of
admitting and nominating women to some unknown position, these
would indeed be “mysterious words”. But the mystery exists only in
the mind of Herr Griin. “One of Saint-Simon’s books” is none other
than the Lettres d’un habitant de Geneve. In this work, after stating that

“ The most numerous and poorest class. — Ed.

Rest of humanity which rallies around the slogan: Equality. — Ed.

c This sentence is omitted in the Westphalische Dampfboot. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

everyone is eligible to subscribe to the Newton Council or its
departments, he continues: “Les femmes seront admises a souscrire,
elles pourront etre nominees ” a — that is, to a position in this Council or
its departments, of course. Stein, as was fitting, quotes this passage in
the course of his discussion of the book itself and makes the
following comment:

Here, etc., “are to be found the germs of his later opinions and even those of his
school; and even the first idea of the emancipation of women” (p. 152).

In a note Stein points out quite rightly that for polemical reasons
Olinde Rodrigues printed this passage in large type in his 1832
edition, since it was the only reference to the emancipation of women
in Saint-Simon’s work. To hide his plagiarism, Grim shifts the
passage from the book to which it belongs to his discussion of the
school, makes the above nonsense of it, changes Stein’s “germ” into a
“seed” and childishly imagines that this passage is the origin of the
doctrine of the emancipation of women.

Herr Grim ventures an opinion on the contradiction which, he
believes, exists between the Lettres and the Catechisme des industries, it
consists in the fact that in the Catechisme the rights of the travailleurs
are asserted. He was bound to discover this difference, of course,
because he derived his knowledge of the Lettres from Stein and
Reybaud, and his knowledge of the Catechisme similarly. Had he read
Saint-Simon himself, he would have found in the Lettres not this
contradiction, but a “seed” of the point of view developed among
others in the Catechisme. For example:

“Tous les hommes travailleront”b ( Lettres , p. 60). “Si sa cervelle” (the rich man’s)
“ne sera pas propre au travail, il sera bien oblige de faire travailler ses bras; car
Newton ne laissera surement pas sur cette planete ... des ouvriers volontairement
inutiles dans l’atelier”c (p. 64).

2. CATECHISME POLITIQUE DES INDUSTRIELSd

As Stein usually quotes this work as the Catechisme des industriels,
Herr Griin knows of no other title. But since he only devotes ten
lines to this work when he comes to speak of it ex officio, one might
have at least expected him to give its correct title.

a “Women will be allowed to subscribe, it will be possible to nominate them.” — Ed.
“All men will work.” — Ed.

c “If his brain” ... “is not fitted for labour, he will be compelled to work with his
hands; for Newton will assuredly not permit on this planet ... workers who,
intejitionally, remain idle in the workshops.” — Ed.

Political Catechism of the Industrialists. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

501

Having copied from Stein the fact that in this work Saint-Simon
wants labour to govern, he continues:

“He now divides the world into idlers and industrialists” (p. 85).

Herr Griin is wrong here. He attributes to the Catechisme a
distinction which he finds set out in Stein much later, in connection
with the school of Saint-Simon.

Stein, page 206:

“Society consists at present only of idlers and workers” (Enfantin).

Instead of this alleged division, there is in the Catechisme a division
into three classes, the classes feodale, intermediaire et industrielle ;
naturally, Herr Griin could not enlarge upon this without recourse
to Stein, since he was not familiar with the Catechisme itself.

Herr Griin then repeats once more that the content of the
Catechisme is the rule of labour and concludes his account of the work
as follows:

“Just as republicanism proclaims: Everything for the people, everything through
the people, Saint-Simon proclaims: Everything for industry, everything through
industry” (ibid.).

Stein, page 165:

“Since industry is the source of everything, everything must serve industry.”

Stein rightly states (page 160, note) that Saint-Simon’s work
Uindustrie, printed as early as 1817, bears the motto: Tout par
Vindustrie, tout pour elle* In his account of the Catechisme, Herr Griin,
therefore, not only commits the error mentioned above but also
misquotes the motto of a much earlier work of which he has no
knowledge whatever.

German thoroughness has in this way given an adequate criticism
of the Catechisme politique des industriels. We find however scattered
throughout Griin’s omnium gatherum isolated glosses which belong
properly to this section. Chuckling over his own slyness, Herr Griin
distributes the material which he finds in Stein’s account of the work
and elaborates it with commendable courage.

Herr Griin, page 87:

“Free competition was an impure and confused concept, a concept which con-
tained in itself a new world of conflict and misery, the struggle between capital and
labour and the misery of the worker who has no capital. Saint-Simon purified the
concept of industry; he reduced it to the concept of the workers, he formulated the rights and
grievances of the fourth estate, of the proletariat. He was forced to abolish the right of
inheritance, since it had become an injustice towards the worker, towards the
industrialist. This is the significance of his Catechisme des industriels.”

Everything through industry, everything for industry. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Herr Griin found the following observation in Stein’s book
(p. 169) with regard to the Catechisme:

“It is, therefore, the true significance of Saint-Simon that he foresaw the
inevitability of this contradiction” (between bourgeoisie and peuple).

This is the source of Herr Grun’s idea of the “significance” of the
Catechisme.

Stein:

“He” (Saint-Simon in the Catechisme ) “begins with the concept of the industrial
worker.”

Herr Griin turns this into complete nonsense by asserting that
Saint-Simon, who found free competition as an “ impure concept”,
“purified the concept of industry and reduced it to the concept of the
workers”. Herr Griin shows everywhere that his concept of free
competition and industry is a very “impure” and a very “confused”
one indeed.

Not satisfied with this nonsense, Herr Griin risks a direct
falsehood and states that Saint-Simon demanded the abolition of the
right of inheritance.

On page 88 he tells us, still relying on his interpretation of Stein’s
version of the Catechisme:

“Saint-Simon established the rights of the proletariat. He already formulated the
new watchword: the industrialists, the workers, shall be raised to a position of supreme
power. This was one-sided, but every struggle involves one-sidedness; he who is not
one-sided cannot wage a struggle.”

Despite his rhetorical maxim about one-sidedness, Herr Griin
himself commits the one-sided error of understanding Stein to say
that Saint-Simon wished to “raise” the real workers, the proletarians,
“to a position of supreme power”. Cf. page 102, where he says of
Michel Chevalier:

“M. Chevalier still refers with great sympathy to the industrialists.... But to the
disciple, the industrialists are no longer, as they were for his master, the proletarians', he
includes capitalists, entrepreneurs and workers in one concept, that is to say, he
includes the idlers in a category which should only embrace the poorest and most
numerous class.”

Saint-Simon numbers among the industrialists not only the
workers, but also the fabricants, the negociants, in short, all
industrial capitalists ; indeed, he addresses himself primarily to them.
Herr Griin could have found this on the very first page of the
Catechisme. But this shows how, without ever having seen the work,
he concocts from hearsay fine phrases about it.

Discussing the Catechisme, Stein says:

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography 503

“After ... Saint-Simon comes to a history of industry in its relation to state authority
... he is the first to be conscious that in the science of industry there lies hidden a
political factor.... It is undeniable that he succeeded in giving an important stimulus.
For France possesses a histoire de I’economie politique only since Saint-Simon”, etc.
(pp. 165, 170).

Stein himself is extremely vague when he speaks of a “political
factor” in “the science of industry”. But he shows that he is on the
right track by adding that the history of the state is intimately
connected with the history of national economy.

Let us see how Herr Grim later, in his discussion of the school of
Saint-Simon, appropriates this fragment of Stein:

“Saint-Simon had attempted a history of industry in his Catechisme des industriels
stressing the political element in it. The master himself paved the way, therefore, for
political economy” (p. 99).

Herr Grim “therefore” transforms the “political factor ” of Stein
into a “political element ” and turns it into a meaningless phrase by
omitting the details given by Stein. This “stone which the builders
have rejected”3 has indeed become for Herr Griin the “cornerstone”
of his Briefe und Studien.b But it has also become for him a
stumbling-block.c But that is not all. Whereas Stein says that
Saint-Simon paved the way for a history of political economy by
stressing the political factor in the science of industry, Herr Griin
makes him the pioneer of political economy itself. Herr Griin argues
something after this fashion: Economics existed already before
Saint-Simon; but, as Stein relates, Saint-Simon stressed the political
factor in industry, therefore he made economics political — political
economics = political economy — hence Saint-Simon paved the way
for political economy. In his conjectures Herr Griin undoubtedly
displays a very genial spirit.

Just as he makes Saint-Simon the pioneer of political economy, he
makes him the pioneer of scientific socialism:

“It” (Saint-Simon ism) “contains ... scientific socialism, for Saint-Simon spent his
whole life searching for the new science”! (p. 82).

3. NOUVEAU CHRISTJANISME6

With his customary brilliance, Herr Griin continues to give us
extracts of extracts by Stein and Reybaud, to which he adds literary

a Cf. 1 Peter 2 : 7.— Ed.

Letters and Studies is the sub-title of Griin’s book. Die soziale Bewegung in
Frankreich und Belgien. — Ed.

A pun on the words Stein, which in German means stone, Eckstein — cornerstone,
and^ Stein des Anstosses — stumbling-block. — Ed.

New Christianity. — Ed.

18—2086

504

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

embellishments and which he dismembers in the most pitiless
fashion. One example will suffice to show that he has never looked at
the original of this work either.

“For Saint-Simon it was a question of establishing a unified view of life, such as is
suitable to organic periods of history, which he expressly opposes to the critical periods.
According to him, we have been living since Luther in a critical period; he thought to
initiate a new organic period. Hence the New Christianity ” (p. 88).

At no time and in no place did Saint-Simon oppose organic to critical
periods of history. This is a downright falsehood on the part of Herr
Grim. Bazard was the first to make this distinction." Herr Grim
discovered from Stein and Reybaud that in Nouveau christianisme
Saint-Simon commends the criticism of Luther, but finds his positive,
dogmatic doctrine faulty. Herr Grim lumps that with what he
remembers was said in the same sources about the school of
Saint-Simon, and out of this he fabricates the above assertion.

After some florid comments on Saint-Simon’s life and works
produced by Herr Grim in the manner described earlier and based
exclusively on Stein and the latter’s primer, Reybaud, Herr Grim
concludes by exclaiming:

“And those moral philistines, Herr Reybaud and the whole band of German
parrots, thought that they had to defend Saint-Simon, by pronouncing with their
usual wisdom that such a man, such a life, must not be measured by ordinary
standards! — Tell me, are your standards made of wood? Tell the truth! We shall be
quite pleased if they are made of good solid oak. Hand them over! We shall gratefully
accept them as a precious gift. We shall not burn them, God forbid! We shall use them
to measure the backs of the philistines” (p. 89).

It is. by affected bluster of this kind that Herr Grim attempts to
prove his superiority over the men whom he has copied.

4. THE SCHOOL OF SAINT-SIMON

Since Herr Grim has read just as much of the school of
Saint-Simon as he read of Saint-Simon himself, that is nothing
whatsoever, he should at least have made a proper summary of Stein
and Reybaud, he should have observed the chronological order, he
should have given a connected account of the course of the events
and he should have mentioned the essential points. He does the
contrary. Led astray by his bad conscience, he mixes everything up as
far as possible, omits the most essential matters and produces a
confusion even greater than that which we saw in his exposition of
Saint-Simon. We must be still more concise here, for it would take a
volume as thick as Herr Griin’s to record every plagiarism and every
blunder.

See Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere annee. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

505

We are given no information about the period from the death of
Saint-Simon to the July Revolution3 — a period which covers part of
the most important theoretical development of Saint-Simonism. And
accordingly the Saint-Simonian criticism of existing conditions, the
most important aspect of Saint-Simonism, is entirely omitted by Herr
Griin. It is indeed hardly possible to say anything about it without a
knowledge of the sources, and in particular of the newspapers.

Herr Griin opens his discourse on the Saint-Simonists with these
words:

“To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works: that is
the practical dogma of the Saint-Simonists.”

Like Reybaud (p. 96), Herr Griin presents this sentence as a
transition from Saint-Simon to the Saint-Simonists and continues:

“It derives directly from the last words of Saint-Simon: all men must be assured the
freest development of their faculties.”

In this case Herr Griin wished to be different from Reybaud, who
links the “practical dogma” with the Nouveau christianisme. Herr
Griin believes this to be an invention of Reybaud’s and unceremoni-
ously substitutes the last words of Saint-Simon for the Nouveau
christianisme. He did not realise that Reybaud was only giving a literal
extract from the Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere annee,
p. 70.

Herr Griin cannot understand why Reybaud, after giving several
extracts concerning the religious hierarchy of Saint-Simonism,
should suddenly introduce the “practical dogma”. Herr Griin
imagines that the hierarchy follows directly from this proposition.
But in fact, the proposition can refer to a new hierarchy only when
taken in conjunction with the religious ideas of the Nouveau
christianisme, whereas apart from these ideas, it can demand at most a
purely secular classification of society. He observes on page 91:

“To each according to his capacity means to make the Catholic hierarchy the law of
the social order. To each capacity according to its works means moreover to turn the
workshop into a sacristy and the whole of civil life into a priestly preserve.”

For in the above-mentioned extract from the Exposition quoted by
Reybaud Herr Griin finds the following:

“L’eglise vraiment universelle va paraitre ... l’eglise universelle gouverne le
temporel comme le spirituel ... la science est sainte, l’industrie est sainte ... et tout bien
est bien d’eglise et toute profession est une fonction religieuse, un grade dans la
hierarchie sociale. — A chacun selon sa capacite, a chaque capacite selon ses oeuvres.”*3

3 1830.— Ed.

b “The truly universal Church shall appear ... the universal Church shall govern
temporal as well as spiritual matters ... science shall be sacred, industry shall be sacred
... and all property shall be the property of the Church, every profession a religious
function, a step in the social hierarchy. — To each according to his capacity, to each capacity
according to its works.” — Ed.

18*

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

To produce his own quite incomprehensible statement, Herr Grim
had only to invert this passage and change the preceding sentences
into conclusions of the final sentence.

Griin’s interpretation of Saint-Simonism assumes “so confused
and tangled a form” that on page 90 he first derives a “spiritual
proletariat” from the “practical dogma”, then from the spiritual
proletariat he produces a “hierarchy of minds”. Finally, out of the
hierarchy of minds he produces the apex of the hierarchy. Had he
read even only the Exposition, he would have seen that the religious
approach of the Nouveau christianisme, together with the problem of
how to determine capacite, necessitates the hierarchy and its apex.

Herr Grim concludes his discussion and criticism of the Exposition
of 1828-29 with the single sentence: “A chacun selon sa capacite , a
chaque capacite selon ses oeuvres .” Apart from this he hardly even
mentions the Producteur and the Organisateur. He glances at Reybaud
and finds in the section “Third Epoch of Saint-Simonism”, p. 126
(Stein, p. 205):

“...et les jours suivants le Globe parut avec le sous-titre de Journal de la doctrine de
Saint-Simon, laquelle etait resumee ainsi sur la premiere page:

Religion

Science Industrie

Association universelle. ”a

Herr Grim passes from the above to the year 1831, without a
break, and improves upon Reybaud in the following terms (p. 91):

“The Saint-Simonists put forward the following outline of their system; the
formulation was largely the work of Bazard:

Religion

Science Industry

Universal Association. ”

Herr Grim leaves out three sentences which are also to be found
on the title-page of the Globe and which all relate to practical social
reforms.135 They are given by both Stein and Reybaud. This enables
him to change what is, so to speak, the mere window-dressing of a
journal into an “outline” of the system. He conceals the fact that it
appeared on the title-page of the Globe and so can criticise the whole
of Saint-Simonism, as contained in the mutilated title of this

a “... and during the following days the Globe appeared with the subtitle: Journal of
the Saint-Simonian Doctrine , which was summarised as follows on the first page:

Religion

Science

Universal Association.” — Ed.

Industry

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

507

newspaper, with the clever comment that religion has pride of place.
He could moreover have discovered from Stein that this is by no
means true of the Globe. The Globe contains the most detailed and
valuable criticism of existing conditions and particularly of economic
conditions — a fact however which Herr Griin could not know.

It is difficult to say from where Herr Griin has obtained the new
bur important piece of information that the “formulation of the
outline”, four words in length, “was largely the work of Bazard” .

Herr Griin now jumps from January 1831 back to October 1830:

“Shortly alter the July Revolution, during the Bazard period ” (where does this
period come from?), “the Saint-Simonists addressed a short but comprehensive
statement of their beliefs to the Chamber of Deputies, after Messrs. Dupin and
Mauguin had accused them from the tribune of preaching community of goods and
wives.”

The Address follows, with the comment by Herr Griin:

“How reasonable and measured it all is still! The Address presented to the
Chamber was edited by Bazard” (pp. 92-94).

To begin with the concluding remark, Stein says, p. 205:

“Judging from its form and its attitude, we should not hesitate to ascribe it” (the
document), “as does Reybaud, to Bazard more than to Enfantin.”

And Reybaud says, p. 123:

“Aux formes, aux pretentions assez moderees de cet ecrit il est facile de voir qu’il
provenait plutot de l’impulsion de M. Bazard que de celle de son collegue.”a

With characteristic ingenuity and audacity, Herr Griin turns
Reybaud’s conjecture that Bazard rather than Enfantin was behind
the Address into the certainty that he edited it in its entirety. The
passage introducing the Address is translated from Reybaud, p. 122:

“MM. Dupin et Mauguin signalerent du haut de la tribune une secte qui prechait la
communaute des biens et la communaute des femmes.”

Herr Griin merely leaves out the date given by Reybaud and writes
instead: “shortly after the July Revolution”. Altogether, chronology
does not suit Herr Griin’s method of emancipating himself from
those who have trodden the ground before him. In contradistinction
to Stein he inserts in the text what Stein relegates to a note, he omits
the introduction to the Address, he translates fonds de production
(productive capital) as “ basic capital ” and classement social des individus
(social classification of individuals) as “social order of individuals”.

a “From the form and the very moderate demands of this document, one can
clearly see that it owes more to the initiative of M. Bazard than to that of his
colleague.” — Ed.

b “Messrs. Dupin and Mauguin drew attention from the tribune to a sect which
was preaching community of goods and community of wives.” — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Some slipshod notes follow on the history of the school of
Saint-Simon; they have been patched together from fragments of
Stein, Reybaud and Louis Blanc with that artistic skill which we
noticed in Griin’s life of Saint-Simon. We leave it to the reader to
look them up in the book for himself.

The reader now has before him all that Herr Grim has to say of
the Bazard period of Saint-Simonism, i.e., the period from the death
of Saint-Simon to the first schism. 1,6 Grim is now in a position to play
an elegantly critical trump, and call Bazard a “poor dialectician”.
Then he continues:

“But so are the republicans. They only know how to die, Cato as much as Bazard; if
they do not stab themselves to death, they die of a broken heart ” (p. 95).

“A few months after this quarrel, his” (Bazard’s) “ heart was broken” (Stein, p. 210).

Such republicans as Levasseur, Carnot, Barere, Billaud-Varennes,
Buonarroti, Teste, d’Argenson, etc., etc., show how correct Herr
Griin’s assertion is.

We are now offered a few commonplaces about Enfantin.
Attention need only be drawn to the following discovery made by
Herr Grim:

“Does this historical phenomenon not make it finally clear that religion is nothing
but sensualism, that materialism can boldly claim the same origin as the sacred dogma
itself?” (p. 97).

Herr Grim looks complacently about him: “Has anyone else ever
thought of that}” He would never have “thought of that” if the
Hallische Jahrbiicher had not already “thought of it” in connection
with the Romantics.3 One would have expected Herr Grim to have
made some little intellectual progress since then.

We have seen that Herr Grim knows nothing of the whole
economic criticism of the Saint-Simonists. Nevertheless, he manages
to say something, with the help of Enfantin, about the economic
consequences of Saint-Simon’s theory, to which he has already made
some airy references earlier. He finds in Reybaud (p. 129 et seq.)
and in Stein (p. 206) extracts from Enfantin’s Political Economy b but
in this case, too, he falsifies the original; for the abolition of taxes on
the most essential necessaries of life, which is correctly shown by
Reybaud and Stein (who base their statements on Enfantin) to be a
consequence of the proposals concerning the right of inheritance, is
turned by Grim into an irrelevant, independent measure in addition
to these proposals. He gives further proof of his originality by

a This refers to Karl Rosenkranz’s article “Ludwig Tieck und die romantische
Schule”.— Ed.

b Barthelemy-Prosper Enfantin, Economie politique et Politique. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

509

falsifying the chronological order; he refers first to the priest
Enfantin and Menilmontant and then to the economist Enfantin,
whereas his predecessors deal with Enfantin’s political economy
during the Bazard period when they are discussing the Globe, for
which it was written.137 Just as here he includes the Bazard period in
the Menilmontant period so later, when referring to economics and
to M. Chevalier, he brings in the Menilmontant period. The occasion
for this is the Livre nouveau,1™ and as usual he turns Reybaud’s
conjecture that M. Chevalier was the author of this work into a
categorical assertion.

Herr Grun has now described Saint-Simonism “in its totality”
(p. 82). He has kept the promise he made “not to subject its literature
to a critical scrutiny” (ibid.) and has therefore got mixed up, most
uncritically, in quite a different “literature”, that of Stein and
Reybaud. He gives us by way of compensation a few particulars
about M. Chevalier’s economic lectures of 1841-42,3 a time when the
latter had long ceased to be a Saint-Simonist. For while writing about
Saint-Simonism, Herr Grim had in front of him a review of these
lectures in the Revue des deux Mondes. He has made use of it in the
same way as he utilised Stein and Reybaud. Here is a sample of his
critical acumen:

“In it he asserts that not enough is being produced. That is a statement worthy of
the old economic school with its rusty prejudices.... As long as political economy does
not understand that production is dependent upon consumption, this so-called
science will not make any headway” (p. 102).

One can see that with these phrases about consumption and
production which he has inherited from true socialism, Herr Grim is
far superior to any economic work. Apart from the fact that any
economist would tell him that supply also depends on demand, i.e.,
that production depends on consumption, there is actually in France
a special economic school, that of Sismondi, which desires to make
production dependent on consumption in a form different from that
which obtains under free competition; it stands in sharp opposition
to the economists attacked by Herr Grim. Not till later, however, do
we see Herr Grun speculating successfully with the talentb entrusted
to him — the unity of production and consumption.

To compensate the reader for the boredom he has suffered from
these sketchy extracts from Stein and Reybaud, which are moreover
falsified and adulterated with phrases, Herr Grim offers him the

a Michel Chevalier, Cours d’Economie politique fait au College de France. — Ed.
b Cf. Matthew 25: 15-30 and Luke 19: 13-26.— Ed.

510

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

following Young-German firework display, glowing with humanism
and socialism:

“Saint-Simonism in its entirety as a social system was nothing more than a cascade
of thoughts, showered by a beneficent cloud upon the soil of France” (earlier, pp. 82,
83, it was described as “a mass of light, but still a chaos of light” (!), “not yet an orderly
illumination” !!). “It was both an overwhelming and a most amusing display. The
author died before the show was put on, one producer died during the performance,
the remaining producers and all the actors discarded their costumes, slipped into their
civilian clothes, went home and behaved as if nothing had happened. It was a
spectacle, an interesting spectacle, if somewhat confused towards the finale; a few of
the performers overacted — and that was all” (p. 104).

How right was Heine when he said about his imitators: “I have
sown dragon’s teeth and harvested fleas.”

FOURIERISM

Apart from the translation of a few passages from the Quatre
mouvements1 on the subject of love, there is nothing here that cannot
be found in a more complete form in Stein. Herr Grim dismisses
morality in a sentence which a hundred other writers had uttered
long before Fourier:

“Morality is, according to Fourier, nothing but the systematic endeavour to repress
the human passions” (p. 147).

That is how Christian morality has always defined itself. Herr
Griin makes no attempt to examine Fourier’s criticism of present-day
agriculture and industry and, as far as trade is concerned, he merely
translates a few general remarks from the Introduction to a section
of the Quatre mouvements (“Origine de l’economie politique et de la
controverse mercantile”, pp. 332, 334 of the Quatre mouvements).
Then come a few extracts from the Quatre mouvements and one from
the Traite de V association, on the French Revolution, together with the
tables on civilisation, which are already known from Stein. The
critical side of Fourier, his most important contribution, is thus
dismissed in the most hasty and superficial fashion in twenty-eight
pages of literal translation; and in these, with very few exceptions,
only the most general and abstract matters are discussed, the trivial
and the important being thrown together in the most haphazard
way.

Herr Griin now gives us an exposition of Fourier’s system.
Churoab, whose work is quoted by Stein, long ago gave us a better and
more complete version. Although Herr Griin considers it “vitally

a Charles Fourier, Theorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generates. — Ed.
b August Ludwig Churoa, Kritische Darstellung der Socialtheorie Fourier’s. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

511

necessary” to offer a profound interpretation of Fourier’s series,139
he can think of nothing better than to quote literally from Fourier
himself and then, as we shall see later, to coin a few fine phrases
about numbers. Fie does not attempt to show how Fourier came to
deal with series, and how he and his disciples constructed them; he
reveals nothing whatever about the inner construction of the series.
It is only possible to criticise such constructions (and this applies also
to the Hegelian method) by demonstrating how they are made and
thereby proving oneself master of them.

Lastly, Herr Grim neglects almost entirely a matter which Stein at
any rate emphasises in some measure, the opposition of travail
repugnant and travail attrayant.

The most important aspect of the whole exposition is Herr Griin’s
criticism of Fourier. The reader may recollect what was said above
concerning the sources of Griin’s criticism. He will now see from the
few examples which follow that Herr Grim first of all accepts the
postulates of true socialism and then sets about exaggerating and
distorting them. It need hardly be mentioned that Fourier’s
distinction between capital, talent and labour offers a magnificent
opportunity for a display of pretentious cleverness; one can talk at
length about the impracticability and the injustice of the distinction,
about the introduction of wage-labour, etc., without criticising this
distinction by reference to the real relationship of labour and capital.
Proudhon has already said all this infinitely better than Herr Grim,
but he failed to touch upon the real issue.

Herr Grim bases his criticism of Fourier’s psychology — as indeed all
his criticism — on the “essence of man”:

“For human essence is all in all” (p. 190).

“Fourier, too, appeals to this human essence and in his own way reveals to us its
inner core” (!) “in his tabulation of the twelve passions; like all honest and reasonable
people, he, too, desires to make man’s inner essence a reality, a practical reality. That
which is within must also be without, and thus the distinction between the internal and the
external must be altogether abolished. The history of mankind teems with socialists, if this
is to be their distinguishing feature.... The important thing about everyone is what he
understands by the essence of man” (p. 190).

Or rather the important thing for the true socialists is to foist upon
everyone thoughts about human essence and to transform the
different stages of socialism into different philosophies of human
essence. This unhistorical abstraction induces Herr Grim to proclaim
the abolition of all distinction between the internal and the external,
which would even put a stop to the propagation of human essence.
But in any case, why should the Germans brag so loudly of their
knowledge of human essence, since their knowledge does not go
beyond the three general attributes, intellect, emotion and will,

512

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

which have been fairly universally recognised since the days of
Aristotle and the Stoics.3 It is from the same standpoint that Herr
Grim reproaches Fourier with having “cleft” man into twelve
passions.

“I shall not discuss the completeness of this table, psychologically speaking; I
consider it inadequate” — (whereupon the public can rest easy, “psychologically
speaking”). — “Does this number give us any knowledge of what man really is? Not for
a moment. Fourier might just as well have enumerated the five senses; the whole man is
seen to be contained in these, if they be properly explained and their human content
righdy interpreted” (as if this “human content” is not entirely dependent on the stage
of development which production and human intercourse have reached). “Indeed, it
is in one sense alone that man is contained, in feeling; his feeling is different from that
of the animal,” etc. (p. 205).

For the first time in his whole book, Herr Grim is obviously
making an effort to say something about Fourier’s psychology from
the standpoint of Feuerbach. It is obvious too that this “whole man”,
“contained” in a single attribute of a real individual and interpreted
by the philosopher in terms of that attribute, is a complete chimera.
Anyway, what sort of man is this, “man” who is not seen in his real
historical activity and existence, but can be deduced from the lobe of
his own ear,b or from some other feature which distinguishes him
from the animals? Such a man “is contained” in himself, like his own
pimple. Of course, the discovery that human feeling is human and
not animal not only makes all psychological experiment superfluous
but also constitutes a critique of all psychology.

Herr Grim finds it an easy matter to criticise Fourier’s treatment of
love; he measures Fourier’s criticism of existing amorous relation-
ships against the fantasies by which Fourier tried to get a mental
image of free love. Herr Grim, the true German philistine, takes
these fantasies seriously. Indeed, they are the only thing which he
does take seriously. It is hard to see why, if he wanted to deal with
this side of the system at all, Grim did not also enlarge upon
Fourier’s remarks concerning education; they are by far the best of
their kind and contain some masterly observations. Herr Grim,
typical Young-German man of letters that he is, betrays, when he
treats of love, how little he has learned from Fourier’s critique. In his
opinion, it is of no consequence whether one proceeds from the
abolition of marriage or from the abolition of private property; the

3 The Westphalische Dampfboot has: “Or rather the important thing for the true
socialists is to transform the different stages of socialism into different philosophies of
human essence and since, according to the true socialists, ‘human essence’ — an
unhistorical abstraction — has been revealed by Feuerbach, they have, as a result of this
transformation, supplied a criticism of the socialist systems as well.” — Ed.

b G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Naturphilosophie, Einleitung, §246,
Zusatz. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

513

one must necessarily follow upon the other. But to wish to proceed
from any dissolution of marriage other than that which now exists in
practice in bourgeois society, is to cherish a purely literary illusion.
Fourier, as Grim might have discovered in his works, always
proceeds from the transformation of production.

Herr Grim is surprised that Fourier, who always starts with
inclination (it should read: attraction), should indulge in all kinds of
“mathematical” experiments, for which reason he calls him the
“mathematical socialist”, page 203. Even if he did not take into
account Fourier’s circumstances, he might well have examined a little
more closely the nature of attraction. He would very soon have
discovered that a natural relation of the kind cannot be accurately
defined without the help of calculation. He regales us instead with a
philippic against number, a philippic in which literary flourishes and
Hegelian tradition are intermixed. It contains passages such as:

Fourier “calculates the molecular content of your most abnormal taste”.

Indeed, a miracle; and further:

“That civilisation, which is being so bitterly attacked, is based upon an unfeeling
multiplication table.... Number is nothing definite.... What is the number one?... The
number one is restless, it becomes two, three, four”

like the German country parson who is “restless” until he has a wife
and nine children....

“Number stifles all that is essential and all that is real; can we halve reason or speak
of a third of the truth?”

He might also have asked, can we speak of a green-coloured
logarithm?...

“Number loses all sense in organic development”...

a statement of fundamental importance for physiology and organic
chemistry (pp. 203, 204).

“He who makes number the measure of all things becomes, nay, is an egoist.”

By a piece of wilful exaggeration, he links to this sentence another,
which he has taken over from Hess (see above3):

“Fourier’s whole plan of organisation is based exclusively upon egoism.... Fourier
is the very worst expression of civilised egoism” (pp, 206, 208).

He supplies immediate proof of this by relating that, in Fourier’s
world order, the poorest member eats from forty dishes every day,
that five meals are eaten daily, that people live to the age of 144 and
so on. With a naive sense of humour Fourier opposes a Gargantuan

This volume, p. 492. — Ed.

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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

view of man to the unassuming mediocrity of the men3 of the
Restoration period; but Herr Griin only sees in this a chance of
moralising in his phiiistine way upon the most innocent side of
Fourier’s fancy, which he abstracts from the rest.

While reproaching Fourier for his interpretation of the French
Revolution, Herr Griin gives us a glimpse of his own insight into the
revolutionary age:

“If association had only been known of forty years earlier” (so he makes Fourier
say), “the Revolution could have been avoided. But how” (asks Herr Griin) “did it
come about that Turgot, the Minister, recognised the right to work and that, in spite
of this, Louis XVI lost his head? After all, it would have been easier to discharge the
national debt by means of the right to work than by means of hen’s eggs” (p. 211).

Herr Griin overlooks the trifling fact that the right to work, which
Turgot speaks of, is none other than free competition and that this
very free competition needed the Revolution in order to establish
itself.

The substance of Herr Griin’s criticism of Fourier is that Fourier
failed to subject “civilisation” to a “fundamental criticism”. And why
did he fail? Here is the reason:

“The manifestations of civilisation have been criticised but not its basis ; it has been
abhorred and ridiculed as it exists, but its roots have not been examined. Neither politics
nor religion have undergone a searching criticism and for that reason the essence of man
has not yet been examined” (p. 209).

So Herr Griin declares that the real living conditions of men are
manifestations, whereas religion and politics are the basis and the root of
these manifestations. This threadbare statement shows that the true
socialists put forward the ideological phrases of German philosophy
as truths superior to the real expositions of the French socialists; it
shows at the same time that they try to link the true object of their
own investigations, human essence, to the results of French social
criticism. If one assumes religion and politics to be the basis of
material living conditions, then it is only natural that everything
should amount in the last instance to an investigation of human
essence, i.e., of man’s consciousness of himself. — One can see,
incidentally, how little Herr Griin minds what he copies; in a later
passage and in the Rheinische ]ahrbiicherh as well, he appropriates, in
his own manner, what the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher had to say
about the relation of citoyen and bourgeois,0 which directly con-
tradicts the statement he makes above.

3 In the Westphalische Dampfboot the following words enclosed in brackets have
been inserted after "men”: “(ies infiniment petits [the infinitely small], Be-
ranger)”. — Ed.

b Karl Griin, “Politik und Socialismus”. — Ed.

c See Marx’s article “On the Jewish question” (present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 146-74)
and this volume, p. 144 and p. 172. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

515

We have reserved to the end the exposition of a statement
concerning production and consumption which true socialism
confided to Herr Griin. It is a striking example of how Herr Grim
uses the postulates of true socialism as a standard by which to
measure the achievements of the French and how, by tearing the
former out of their complete vagueness, he reveals them to be utter
nonsense.

“Production and consumption can be separated temporally and spatially, in theory
and in external reality, but in essence they are one. Is not the commonest occupation,
e.g., the baking of bread, a productive activity, which is in its turn consumption for a
hundred others? Is it not, indeed, consumption on the part of the baker himself, who
consumes corn, water, milk, eggs, etc.? Is not the consumption of shoes and clothes
production on the part of cobblers and tailors?... Do I not produce when I eat bread? I
produce on an enormous scale. I produce mills, kneading-troughs, ovens and
consequently ploughs, harrows, flails, mill-wheels, the labour of wood-workers and
masons” (“and consequently”, carpenters, masons and peasants, “consequently”,
their parents, “consequently”, their whole ancestry, “consequently”, Adam). “Do I
not consume when I produce? On a huge scale, too.... If I read a book, I consume first
of all the product of whole years of work; if I keep it or destroy it, I consume the
material and the activity of the paper-mill, the printing-press and the bookbinder. But
do I produce nothing? I produce perhaps a new book and thereby new paper, new
type, new printer’s ink, new bookbinding tools; if I merely read it and a thousand
others read it too, we produce by our consumption a new edition and all the materials
necessary for its manufacture. The manufacturers of all these consume on their part a
mass of raw material which must be produced and which can only be produced
through the medium of consumption.... In a word, activity and enjoyment are one,
only a perverse world has torn them asunder and has thrust between them the concept
of value and price; by means of this concept it has torn man asunder and with man,
society” (pp. 191, 192).

Production and consumption are, in reality, frequently opposed to
one another. But in order to restore the unity of the two and resolve
all contradictions, one need only interpret these contradictions
correctly and comprehend the true nature of production and
consumption. Thus this German ideological theory fits the existing
world perfectly; the unity of production and consumption is proved
by means of examples drawn from present-day society, it exists in
itself. Herr Griin demonstrates first of all that there actually does
exist a relationship between production and consumption. He argues
that he cannot wear a coat or eat bread unless both are produced and
that there exist in modern society people who produce coats, shoes
and bread which other people consume. This idea is, in Herr Griin’s
opinion, a new one. He clothes it in his classical, literary-ideological
language. For example:

“It is believed that the enjoyment of coffee, sugar, etc., is mere consumption; but is
this enjoyment not, in fact, production in the colonies?”

516

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

He might just as well have asked: Does not this enjoyment imply
that Negro slaves enjoy the lash and that floggings are produced in
the colonies? One can see that the outcome of such exuberance as
this is simply an apology for existing conditions. Herr Griin’s second
idea is that when he produces, he consumes, namely raw material,
the costs of production in fact; this is the discovery that nothing can
be created out of nothing, that he must have material. He would have
found set out in any political economy, under the heading
“productive consumption”, the complicated relations which this
involves if one does not restrict oneself, like Herr Grim, to the trivial
fact that shoes cannot be made without leather.

So far, Herr Grim has realised that it is necessary to produce in
order to consume and that raw material is consumed in the
productive process. His real difficulties begin when he wishes to
prove that he produces when he consumes. Herr Grim now makes a
completely ineffective attempt to enlighten himself in some small
degree upon the most commonplace and general aspects of the
connection between supply and demand. He does discover that his
consumption, i.e., his demand, produces a fresh supply. But he
forgets that his demand must be effective, that he must offer an
equivalent for the product desired, if his demand is to cause fresh
production. The economists too refer to the inseparability of
consumption and production and to the absolute identity of supply
and demand, especially when they wish to prove that over-
production never takes place; but they never perpetrate anything so
clumsy, so trivial as Herr Grim. This is moreover the same sort of
argument that the aristocracy, the clergy, the rentiers, etc., have
always used to prove their own productivity. Herr Grim forgets,
further, that the bread which is produced today by steam-mills, was
produced earlier by wind-mills and water-mills and earlier still by
hand-mills; he forgets that these different methods of production
are quite independent of the actual eating of the bread and that we
are faced, therefore, with an historical development of the
productive process. Of course, producing as he does on “an
enormous scale”, Herr Grim never thinks of this. He has no inkling
of the fact that these different stages of production involve different
relations of production to consumption, different contradictions of
the two; it does not occur to him that to understand these
contradictions one must examine the particular mode of production,
together with the whole set of social conditions based upon it; and
that only by actually changing the mode of production and the entire
social system based upon it can these contradictions be solved. While
the other examples given by Herr Grim prove that he surpasses even

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

517

the most undistinguished economists in banality, his example of the
book shows that these economists are far more “humane” than he is.
They do not demand that as soon as he has consumed a book he
should produce another! They are content that he should produce
his own education by his consumption and so exert a favourable
influence upon production in general. Herr Griin’s productive
consumption is transformed into a real miracle, since he omits the
connecting link, the cash payment; he makes it superfluous by simply
ignoring it, but in fact it alone makes his demand effective. He reads,
and by the mere fact of his reading, he enables the type-founders, the
paper manufacturers and the printers to produce new type, new
paper and new books. The mere fact of his consumption compen-
sates them all for their costs of production. Incidentally, in the
foregoing examination we have amply demonstrated the virtuosity
with which Herr Grim produces new books from old by merely
reading the latter, and with which he incurs the gratitude of the
commercial world by his activities as a producer of new paper, new
type, new printer’s ink and new bookbinding tools. Grim ends the
first letter in his book with the words:

“I am on the point of plunging into industry.”

Herr Grim never once belies this motto of his in the whole of his
book.

What did all his activity amount to? In order to prove the true
socialist proposition of the unity of production and consumption,
Herr Griin has recourse to the most commonplace economic
statements concerning supply and demand; moreover, he adapts
these to his purpose simply by omitting the necessary connecting
links, thereby transforming them into pure fantasies. The essence of
ail this is, therefore, an ill-informed and fantastic transfiguration of
existing conditions.

In his socialistic conclusion, he lisps, characteristically, the phrases
he has learned from his German predecessors. Production and
consumption are separated because a perverse world has torn them
asunder. How did this perverse world set about it? It thrust a concept
between the two. By so doing, it tore man asunder. Not content with
this, it thereby tears society, i.e., itself, asunder, too. This tragedy
took place in 1845.

The true socialists originally understood the unity of consumption
and production to mean that activity shall itself involve enjoyment
(for them, of course, a purely fanciful notion). According to Herr
Griin’s further definition of that unity, “consumption and produc-
tion, economically speaking, must coincide ” (p. 196); there must be

518

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

no surplus of products over and above the immediate needs of
consumption, which means, of course, the end of any movement
whatsoever. With an air of importance, he therefore reproaches
Fourier with wishing to disturb this unity by over-production. Herr
Grim forgets that over-production causes crises only through its
influence on the exchange value of products and that not only with
Fourier but also in Herr Griin’s perfect world exchange value has
disappeared. All that one can say of this philistine rubbish is that it is
worthy of true socialism.

With the utmost complacency, Herr Grim repeats again and again
his commentary on the true socialist theory of production and
consumption. For example, he tells us in the course of a discussion of
Proudhon:

“Preach the social freedom of the consumers and you will have true equality of
production” (p. 433).

Preaching this is an easy matter! All that has hitherto been wrong
has been that

“consumers have been uneducated, uncultured, they do not all consume in a human
way ” (p. 432). “The view that consumption is the measure of production, instead of
the contrary, is the death of every hitherto existing economic theory” (ibid.). “The
real solidarity of mankind, indeed, bears out the truth of the proposition that the
consumption of each presupposes the consumption of all” (ibid.).

Within the competitive system, the consumption of each presup-
poses more or less continuously the consumption of all, just as the
production of each presupposes the production of all. It is merely a
question of how, in what way, this is so. Herr Griin’s only answer to
this is the moral postulate of human consumption, the recognition of
the “essential nature of consumption” (p. 432). Since he knows
nothing of the real relations of production and consumption, he has
to take refuge in human essence, the last hiding-place of the true
socialists. For the same reason, he insists on proceeding from
consumption instead of from production. If you proceed from
production, you necessarily concern yourself with the real conditions
of production and with the productive activity of men. But if you
proceed from consumption, you can set your mind at rest by merely
declaring that consumption is not at present “human”, and by
postulating “human consumption”, education for true consumption
and so on. You can be content with such phrases, without bother-
ing at all about the real living conditions and the activity of
men.

It should be mentioned in conclusion that precisely those
economists who took consumption as their starting-point happened

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

519

to be reactionary and ignored the revolutionary element in
competition and large-scale industry.

THE “LIMITATIONS OF PAPA CABET”

AND HERR GRUN

Herr Grim concludes his digression on the school of Fourier and
on Herr Reybaud with the following words:

“I wish to make the organisers of labour conscious of their essence, I wish to show them
historically where they have sprung from ... these hybrids ... who cannot claim as their
own even the least of their thoughts. And later, perhaps, I shall find space to make an
example of Herr Reybaud, not only of Herr Reybaud, but also of Herr Jay. The
former is, in reality, not so bad, he is merely stupid; but the latter is more than stupid,
he is learned.

“And so”... (p. 260).

The gladiatorial posture into which Herr Griin throws himself, his
threats against Reybaud, his contempt for learning, his resounding
promises, these are all sure signs that something portentous is
stirring within him. Fully “conscious of his essence” as we are, we
infer from these symptoms that Herr Griin is on the point of
carrying out a most tremendous plagiaristic coup. To anyone who
has had experience of his tactics, his bragging loses all ingenuousness
and turns out to be always a matter of sly calculation.

“And so”:

A chapter follows headed:

“The Organisation of Labour!”

Where did this thought originate? — In France. — But how?”

ft is also labelled:

“Review of the Eighteenth Century.”

“Where did this” chapter of Herr Griin’s “originate? — In
France. — But how?” The reader will find out without delay.

It should not be forgotten that Herr Griin wants to make the
French organisers of labour140 conscious of their essence by an
historical exposition in the profound German style.

And so.

When Herr Griin realised that Cabet “had his limitations” and
that his “mission had been completed long ago” (which he had
known for a long time), it did not, “of course, mean an end of
everything”. On the contrary, by arbitrarily selecting a few
quotations from Cabet and stringing them together he laid upon
Cabet the new mission: to provide the French “background” to Herr
Griin’s German history of socialist development in the eighteenth
century.

520

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

How does he set about his task? He reads “ productively

The twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie
contain a motley collection of the opinions of ancient and modern
authorities in favour of communism. He does not claim that he is
tracing an historical movement. The French bourgeois view
communism as a suspicious character. Good, says Cabet, in that case,
men of the utmost respectability from every age will testify to the
good character of my client; and Cabet proceeds exactly like a
lawyer. Even the most adverse evidence becomes in his hands
favourable to his client. One cannot demand historical accuracy in a
legal defence. If a famous man happens to let fall a word against
money, or inequality, or wealth, or social evils, Cabet seizes upon it,
begs him to repeat it, puts it forward as the man’s declaration of
faith, has it printed, applauds it and cries with ironic good humour
to his irritated bourgeois: “Ecoutez, ecoutez, n’etait-il pas communiste?”*
No one escapes him. Montesquieu, Sieyes, Lamartine, even Guizot —
communists all malgre eux. Voila mon Communiste tout trouve!h

Herr Grim, in a productive mood, reads the quotations collected
by Cabet, representing the eighteenth centuiy; he never doubts for a
moment the essential rightness of it all; he improvises for the benefit
of the reader a mystical connection between the writers whose names
happen to be mentioned by Cabet on one page, pours over the whole
his Young-German literary slops and then gives it the title which we
saw above.

And so.

Herr Griin:

Herr Griin introduces his re-
view with the following words:

“The social idea did not fall from
heaven, it is organic, i.e., it arose by a
process of gradual development. I can-
not write here its complete history, I
cannot commence with the Indians and
the Chinese and proceed to Persia, Egypt
and Judaea. I cannot question the
Greeks and Romans about their social
consciousness, I cannot take the evidence
of Christianity, Neo-Platonism and pa-
tristic philosophy,141 I cannot listen to
what the Middle Ages and the Arabs
have to say, nor can I examine the

Cabet:

Cabet introduces his quota-
tions with the following words:

“Vous pretendez, adversaires de la
communaute, qu’elle n’a pour elle que
quelques opinions sans credit et sans
poids; eh bien, je vais interroger devant
vous l’histoire et tous les philosophes:
ecoutez! Je ne m’arrete pas a vous parler
de plusieurs peuples anciens, qui prati-
quaient ou avaient pratique la com-
munaute des biens! Je ne m’arrete non
plus aux Hebreux ... ni aux pretres
Egyptiens, ni a Minos ... Lycurgue et
Pythagore ... je ne vous parle non plus de
Confucius et de Zoroastre, qui l’un en

a “Hear what he has to say! Was he not a communist?” — Ed.
b There’s the communist all complete. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

521

Reformation and philosophy during the
period of its awakening and so on up to
the eighteenth century” (p. 261).

Chine et l’autre en Perse ... proclamerent
ce principe.”3 ( Voyage en Icarie, deux-
ieme edition, p. 470.)

After the passages given above, Cabet investigates Greek and
Roman history, takes the evidence of Christianity, of Neo- Platonism,
of the Fathers of the Church, of the Middle Ages, of the
Reformation and of philosophy during the period of its awakening.
Cf. Cabet, pp. 471-82. Herr Grim leaves others “more patient than
himself” to copy these eleven pages, “provided the dust of erudition
has left them the necessary humanism to do so” (that is, to copy
them). (Grim, p. 261.) Only the social consciousness of the Arabs
belongs to Herr Grim. We await longingly the disclosures about it
which he has to offer the world. “I must restrict myself to the
eighteenth century.” Let us follow Herr Grim into the eighteenth
century, remarking only that Grim underlines almost the very same
words as Cabet.1’

Herr Griin:

“Locke, the founder of sensation-
ism, observes: He whose possessions ex-
ceed his needs, oversteps the bounds of
reason and of original justice and steals
that which belongs to others. Every sur-
plus is usurpation, and the sight of the
needy must awaken remorse in the soul
of the wealthy. Corrupt men, you who
roll in luxury and pleasures, tremble lest
one day the wretch who lacks the neces-
sities of life shall truly come to know the
rights of man. Fraud, faithlessness and
avarice have produced that inequality of
possessions which is the great misfortune of
the human race by piling up all sorts of
sufferings, on the one hand, beside
riches, on the other, beside destitution.
The philosopher must, therefore, regard the

Cabet :

“Mais voici Locke, ecoutez-le s’ecrier
dans son admirable Gouvernement civil":
‘Celui qui possede au dela de ses be-
soins, passe les bornes de la raison et
de la justice primitive et enleve ce qui
appartient aux autres. T oute superfluite est
une usurpation, et, la vue de 1’indigent
devrait eveiller le remords dans Tame du
riche. Hommes pervers, qui nagez dans
l’opulence et les voluptes, tremblez qu’un
jour l’infortune qui manque du neces-
saire n’aprenne a connaitre vraiment les
droits de I’homme.’ Ecoutez-le s’ecrier en-
core: ‘La fraude, la mauvaise foi, I’ava-
rice ont produit cette inegalite dans les for-
tunes, qui fait le malheur de I’espece humai-
ne, en amoncelant d’un cote tous les vices
avec la richesse et de 1’autre tous les

a “You claim, foes of common ownership, that there is but a scanty weight of
opinion in its favour. Well then, before your very eyes, I am going to take the evidence
of history and of every philosopher. Listen! I shall not linger to tell you of those
peoples of the past who practised community of goods! Nor shall I linger over the
Hebrews ... nor the Egyptian priesthood, nor Minos ... Lycurgus and Pythagoras.... I
shall make no mention of Confucius, nor of Zoroaster, who proclaimed, the one in
China, the other in Persia ... this principle.” — Ed.

The last part of this sentence from “remarking only that” to “Cabet” is omitted
in the Westphalische Dampfboot. — Ed.

c Two Treatises on Civil Government. — Ed.

522

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

use of money as one of the most pernicious maux avec la misere’” (of which Herr

inventions of human industry ” (p. 266). Griin makes nonsense). “‘Le philosophe

doit done considerer l’usage de la mon-
naie comme une des plus funestes inven-
tions de l’industrie humaine’”"1 (p. 485).

Herr Griin concludes from these quotations of Cabet’s that Locke
is “an opponent of the monetary system” (p. 264), “a most out-
spoken opponent of money and of all property which exceeds the
limits of need” (p. 266). Locke was, unfortunately, one of the first
scientific champions of the monetary system, a most uncompromis-
ing advocate of the flogging of vagabonds and paupers, one of the
doyens of modern political economy .b

Herr Griin:

“Already Bossuet, the Bishop of
Meaux, says in his Politics Derived from
Holy Scripture: ‘Without governments’
(‘without politics’ — an absurd interpola-
tion on the part of Herr Griin) ‘the earth
with all its goods would be the common
property of men, just as much as air and
light; no man, according to the original
law of nature, has a particular right to
anything. All things belong to all men; it is
from civil government that property results.’
A priest in the seventeenth century
has the honesty to say such things as
these; to express such views as these!
And the German Puffendorf, whom one”
(i.e., Herr Griin) “knows only through
one of Schiller’s epigrams,0 was of the
following opinion: ‘ The present inequality
of means is an injustice which involves all
other inequalities by reason of the inso-

Cabet:

“Ecoutez le baron de Puffendorf,
professeur de droit naturel en Al-
lemagne et conseiller d’etat a Stockholm
et a Berlin, qui dans son droit de la
nature et des gens refute la doctrine
d’Hobbes et de Grotius sur la monarchic
absolue, qui proclame 1’egalite naturelle,
la fraternite, la communaute des biens
primitive, et qui reconnait que la prop-
riety est une institution humaine, qu’elle
resulte d’un partage consenti pour as-
surer a chacun et surtout au travailleur
une possession perpetuelle, indivise ou
divise, et que par consequent l’inegalite
actuelle de fortune est une injustice qui
n’entraine les autres inegalites” (absurd-
ly translated by Herr Griin) “que par
/’ insolence des riches et la Idchete des pauvres.

“Et Bossuet, l’eveque de Meaux. le
precepteur du Dauphin de France, le

a “But here we have Locke, who exclaims in his admirable Civil Covemment : ‘He
who possesses in excess of his needs, oversteps the bounds of reason and of original
justice and appropriates the property of others. All excess is usurpation, and the sight of the
needy ought to awaken remorse in the soul of the wealthy. Perverse men, you who roll
in riches and pleasures, tremble lest one day the w retch, who lacks the necessities of
life truly apprehend the rights of man.' Hear him exclaim again: ‘Fraud, bad faith,
avarice have produced that inequality of means, which, by piling on the one hand wealth
and vice and on the other poverty and suffering, constitutes the great misfortune of the
human race.... The philosopher must, therefore, regard the use of money as one of the
most fatal inventions of human industry.’” — Ed.

The following note is added in brackets in the Westphalische Dampfboot: “Cf.
Locke’s book. Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, etc.",
published in 1691, and also his Further Considerations [Concerning Raising the Value of
Money], published in 1698. — Ed.

c Friedrich Schiller, “Die Philosophen”. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

523

celebre Bossuet, dans sa Politique tiree de
VEcriture sainte, redigee pour 1’instruc-
tion du Dauphin, ne reconnait-il pas
aussi que sans les gouvernements la terre
et tous les biens seraient aussi communs
entre les hommes que l’air et la lumiere:
Selon le droit primitif de la nature rrul
n’a le droit particulier sur quoi que ce
soit: tout est a tous, et c’est du gouverne-
ment civil que nait la propriete”a
(p. 486).

The substance of Herr Griin’s “digression” from France is that
Cabet quotes a German. Grim even spells the German name in the
incorrect French fashion. Apart from his occasional mistranslations
and omissions, he surprises us by his improvements. Cabet speaks
first of Pufendorf and then of Bossuet; Herr Grim speaks first of
Bossuet and then of Pufendorf. Cabet speaks of Bossuet as a famous
man; Herr Griin calls him a “priest”. Cabet quotes Pufendorf with
all his titles; Herr Griin makes the frank admission that one knows
him only from one of Schiller’s epigrams. Now he knows him also
from one of Cabet’s quotations, and it is apparent that the French-
man, with all his limitations, has made a closer study than Herr Griin
not only of his own countrymen, but of the Germans as well.

Cabet says: “I must make haste to deal with the great philosophers
of the eighteenth century; I shall begin with Montesquieu” (p. 487).
In order to reach Montesquieu, Herr Griin begins with a sketch of
the “legislative genius of the eighteenth century” (p. 282). Compare
their various quotations from Montesquieu, Mably, Rousseau,
Turgot. It suffices here to compare Cabet and Herr Griin on
Rousseau and Turgot. Cabet proceeds from Montesquieu to
Rousseau. Herr Griin constructs this transition:

d “Listen to Baron von PuJJnidarf, a professor of natural law in Germany and a
Councillor of State in Stockholm and Berlin, a man who in his law of nature and
nations refutes the doctrine of Hobbes and Grotius concerning absolute monarchy,
who proclaims natural equality, fraternity, and primitive community of goods, and
who recognises property to be a human institution, the result of a distribution of
goods, by common consent, to the end that all, and particularly the workers, may be
assured of permanent possession, undivided or divided, and that, in consequence, the
existing inequality of possessions is an injustice which only involves the other
inequalities in consequence of the insolence of the rich and the cowardice of the poor.

“And does not Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux, the preceptor of the French
Dauphin, the famous Bossuet, recognise also in his Politique tiree de VEcriture
sainte — written for the Dauphin — that, were it not for governments, the earth and all
goods would be as common to men as air and light; according to the primary law
of nature, no one has a particular right to anything', all things belong to all men and it is
from civil government that property springs.” — Ed.

lence of the rich and the cowardice of the
poor’” (p. 270). Herr Griin adds:
“We shall not digress, let us remain in
France.”

524

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“Rousseau was the radical and Montesquieu the constitutional politician.”

Herr Griin quotes from Rousseau:
“The greatest evil has already been
done when one has to defend the poor
and restrain the rich, etc.”

(ends with the words) “hence it follows
that the social state is only advantageous
to men if they all of them'* have some-
thing and none has too much.” Accord-
ing to Herr Griin, Rousseau becomes
“confused and quite vague when he has
to answer the question: what transforma-
tion does the previous form of property
undergo when primitive man enters into
society? What does he answer? He
answers: Nature has made all goods
common” ... (ends with the words) “if a
distribution takes place the share of each
becomes his property” (pp. 284, 285).

Cabet:

“Ecoutez maintenant Rousseau, l’au-
teur de cet immortel Contrat social ...
ecoutez: ‘Les hommes sont egaux en
droit. La nature a rendu tous les biens
communs ... dans le cas de partage le
part de chacun devient sa propriete.
Dans tous les cas la societe est toujours
seule proprietaire de tous les biens’” (a
point omitted by Herr Griin). “Ecoutez
encore:...” (Cabet ends) “‘d’ou il suitque
l’etat social n’est avantageux aux
hommes qu’autant qu’ils ont tous quel-
que chose et qu’aucun d’eux n’a rien de
trop.’

“Ecoutez, ecoutez encore Rousseau
dans son Economic politique : ‘Le plus
grand mal est deja fait quand on a des
pauvres a defendre, et des riches a
contenir ”b etc., etc. (pp. 489, 490).

Herr Griin makes two brilliant innovations: firstly, he merges the
quotations from the Contrat social and the Economie politique and,
secondly, he begins where Cabet ends. Cabet names the titles of the
writings of Rousseau from which he quotes, Herr Griin suppresses
them. The explanation of these tactics is, perhaps, that Cabet is
speaking of Rousseau’s Economie politique, which Herr Griin does
not know, even from an epigram of Schiller. Although Herr Griin
is conversant with all the secrets of the Encyclopedie (cf. p. 263), it was
a secret for him that Rousseau’s Economie politique is none other than
the article in the Encyclopedie on political economy.

Let us pass on to Turgot. Herr Griin is not content here with
merely copying the quotations; he actually transcribes the sketch that
Cabet gives of Turgot.

Herr Griin: Cabet:

“One of the noblest and most futile “Et cependant, tandis que le roi

attempts to establish a new order on the declare que lui seul et son ministre

a The parenthesis “(What grammar!)” is added in the Westphalische Dampf-
boot. — Ed.

“Listen now to Rousseau, the author of the immortal Social Contract — listen: ‘Men
are equal by right. Nature has made all goods common... if distribution takes place the
share of each becomes his property. In all cases the sole proprietor of all goods is
society.’ Listen again: ... ‘hence it follows that the social state is only advantageous to
men inasmuch as they all have something and none has too much’.

“Listen, listen again to Rousseau in his Political Economy [Economie ou (Economie
( Morale et Politique)]: ‘The greatest evil has already been done when one has to defend
the poor and restrain the rich.’” — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

525

foundations of the old, everywhere on
the point of collapse, was made by
Turgot. It was in vain. The aristocracy
brought about an artificial famine, insti-
gated revolts, intrigued and spread
calumnies against him until the debonair
Louis dismissed his Minister. — The aris-
tocracy would not listen, therefore, it
had to suffer. Human development al-
ways avenges fearfully those good angels
who utter the last urgent warning before
a catastrophe. The French people
blessed Turgot, Voltaire wished to kiss
his hand before he died, the King had
called him his friend.... Turgot, the Bar-
on, the Minister, one of the last feudal
lords, pondered the idea that a domestic
press ought to be invented so as to make
freedom of the press completely secure”
(pp. 289, 290).

(Turgot) sont dans la cour les amis du
peuple, tandis que le peuple le comble de
ses benedictions, tandis que les
philosophes le couvrent de leur admira-
tion, tandis que Voltaire veut, avant de
mourir, baiser la main qui a signe tant
d’ameliorations populaires, l’aristocratie
conspire, organise meme une vaste
famine et des emeutes pour le perdre et
fait tant par ses intrigues et calomnies
qu’elle parvient a dechainer les salons
de Paris contre le reformateur et a
perdre Louis XVI lui-meme en le for-
cant a renvoyer le vertueux ministre qui
le sauverait” (p. 497). “Revenons a
Turgot, baron, ministre de Louis XVI
pendant la premiere annee de son regne,
qui veut reformer les abus, qui fait une
foule de reformes, qui veut faire etablir
une nouvelle langue et qui, pour assurer
la liberte de la presse, travaille lui-meme
a l’invention d’une presse a domicile”3
(p. 495).

Cabet calls Turgot a Baron and a Minister, Herr Griin copies this
much from him, but by way of improving on Cabet, he changes the
youngest son of the prevot of the Paris merchants into “one of the
oldest of the feudal lords”. Cabet is wrong in attributing the famine
and the uprising of 1 775 142 to the machinations of the aristocracy.
Up to the present, no one has discovered who was behind the outcry
about the famine and the movement connected with it. But in any
case the parliaments and popular prejudice had far more to do with
it than the aristocracy. It is quite in order for Herr Griin to copy this
error of “poor limited Papa” Cabet. He believes in him as in a gospel.
On Cabet’s authority Herr Griin numbers Turgot among the
communists, Turgot, one of the leaders of the physiocratic school,

3 “Yet while the King declared that he and his Minister (Turgot) were the only
friends the people had at court, while the people heaped blessings upon him, while the
philosophers overwhelmed him with admiration, while Voltaire wished to kiss before
he died the hand which had signed so many improvements for the people, the
aristocracy conspired against him, even organised a vast famine, and stirred up
insurrections in order to destroy him; by its intrigues and calumnies it succeeded in
turning the Paris salons against the reformer and in destroying Louis XVI himself by
forcing him to dismiss the virtuous Minister who would have saved him.” “Let us
return to Turgot, a Baron, a Minister of Louis XVI during the first year of his reign,
one who desired to reform abuses, who carried through a mass of reforms, who
wished to establish a new language;(a man who actually tried to invent a domestic press
in order to ensure the freedom of the press.” — Ed.

526

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

the most resolute champion of free competition, the defender of
usury, the mentor of Adam Smith. Turgot was a great man, since his
actions were in accordance with the time in which he lived and not
with the illusions of Herr Grim, the origin of which we have shown
already.

Let us now pass to the men of the French Revolution. Cabet
greatly embarrasses his bourgeois opponent by numbering Sieyes
among the forerunners of communism, by reason of the fact that he
recognised equality of rights, and considered that only the state
sanctions property (Cabet, pp. 499-502). Herr Grim, who “is fated to
find the French mind inadequate and superficial every time that he
comes into close contact with it”, cheerfully copies this, and imagines
that an old party leader like Cabet is destined to preserve the
“humanism” of Herr Grim from “the dust of erudition”. Cabet
continues: “Ecoutez le jameux Mirabeau /”a (p. 504). Herr Grim
says: “Listen to Mirabeau!” (p. 292) and quotes some of the passages
stressed by Cabet, in which Mirabeau advocates the equal division of
bequeathed property among brothers and sisters. Herr Grim
exclaims: “Communism for the family!” (p. 292). On this principle,
Herr Grim could go through the whole range of bourgeois
institutions, finding in all of them traces' of communism, so that
taken as a whole they could be said to represent perfect commu-
nism. He could christen the Code Napoleon a Code de la communaute!h
And he could discover communist colonies in the brothels, barracks
and prisons.

Let us conclude these tiresome quotations with Condorcet. A
comparison of the two books will show the reader very clearly that
Herr Grim now omits passages, now merges them, now quotes titles,
now suppresses them, leaves out the chronological dates but
meticulously follows Cabet’s order, even when Cabet does not
proceed strictly in accordance with chronology, and he achieves in
the end nothing more than an abridgement of Cabet, poorly and
timidly disguised.

Herr Griin: Cabet:

“Condorcet is a radical Girondist. He
recognises the injustice of the dis-
tribution of property, he absolves the
poor from blame ... if the people are
somewhat dishonest on principle, the
cause lies in the institutions themselves.

“Entendez Condorcet soutenir dans sa
reponse a l’academie de Berlin” ... (a
long passage follows in Cabet, conclud-
ing:) ‘“C’est done uniquement parce que
les institutions sont mauvaises que le
peuple est si souvent un peu voleur par
principe.’

a “Listen to the famous Mirabeau!” — Ed.

b A reference to Dezamy’s main work, Code de la Communaute. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

527

“In his journal. Social Education ... he
even tolerates large-scale capitalists....

“Condorcet moved that the Legisla-
tive Assembly should divide the 100
millions owned by the three princes who
emigrated into 100,000 parts .... he
organises education and the establishment
of public assistance” (cf. the original
text).

“In his report on public education to
the Legislative Assembly, Condorcet
says: ‘The object of education and the
duty of the political authorities ... is to
offer every member of the human race
the means of satisfying his needs, etc.’”
(Herr Grim changes the report of the
Committee on Condorcet’s plan into a
report by Condorcet himself.) (Grim,
pp. 293, 294.)

“Ecoutez-le dans son journal L’in-
struction sociale ... il tolere meme de
grands capitalistes.” etc.

“Ecoutez 1’un des chefs Girondins, le
philosophe Condorcet, le 6 juillet 1792 a
la tribune de 1’assemblee legislative: ‘De-
cretez que les biens des trois princes
frangais (Louis XVIII, Charles X, et le
prince de Conde’” — this is omitted by
Herr Griin) “ ‘soient sur-le-champ mis en
vente ... ils montent a pres de 100 mil-
lions, et vous remplacerez trois princes
par cent mille citoyens ... orgamsez
1’instruction et les etabhssements de se-
cours publics.’

“Mais ecoutez le comite d’instruction
publique presentant a 1’assemblee legisla-
tive son rapport sur le plan d’education
redige par Condorcet, 20 avril 1792:
‘L’education publique doit offrir a tous
les individus les moyens de pourvoir a
leurs besoins ... tel doit etre le premier
but d’une instruction nationale et sous ce
point de vue elle est pour la puissance
politique un devoir de justice’”,3 etc.
(pp. 502, 503, 505, 509).

By this shameless copying from Cabet, Herr Griin, using the
historical method, endeavours to make the French organisers of
labour conscious of their essence; he proceeds moreover according
to the principle: Divide et impera. He unhesitatingly interpolates
among his quotations his definitive verdict on persons whose
acquaintance he made a moment ago by reading a passage about

a “Listen to Condorcet, who maintained in his reply to the Berlin Academy” ...
“‘It is therefore entirely because the institutions are evil that the people are so
frequently a little dishonest on principle.’

“Listen to what he has to say in his journal L’instruction sociale ... he even tolerates
large-scale capitalists....

“Listen to one of the Girondist leaders, the philosopher Condorcet, from the
tribune of the Legislative Assembly, on the 6th July, 1792: ‘Decree that the possessions
of the three French princes (Louis XVIII, Charles X and the Prince of Conde) be
immediately put up for sale ... they amount to almost 100 millions, and you will
replace three princes by 100 thousand citizens ... organise education and institutions
for public assistance.’

“But listen to the Committee of Public Education, presenting to the Legislative
Assembly on the 20th April, 1792 its report on the plan of education drawn up by
Condorcet: ‘Public education should offer to every individual the means of providing
for his needs ... such ought to be the first aim of national education and from this
point of view it is a duty which justice demands of the political authorities.’” — Ed.

528

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

them; then he inserts a few phrases about the French Revolution and
divides the whole into two halves by the use of a few quotations from
Morelly. Just at the right moment for Herr Grim Morelly was en
vogue in Paris, through the efforts of Villegardelle3; and the most
important passages from Morelly’s work had been translated in the
Paris Vorwartsb long before Herr Grim came upon the scene. We
shall adduce only one or two glaring examples of Herr Griin’s
slipshod method of translation.

Morelly:

“L’interet rend les cceurs denatures et repand 1’amertume sur les plus doux liens,
qu’il change en de pesantes chaines que detestent chez nous les epoux en se detestant
eux-memes.”c

Herr Griin:

“Self-interest renders the heart unnatural and embitters the dearest ties,
transforming them into heavy chains, which our married people detest and they detest
themselves into the bargain ” (p. 274).

Utter nonsense.

Morrelly :

“Notre ame ... contracte une soif si furieuse qu’elle se suffoque pour l’etancher.”d

Herr Griin :

“Our soul ... contracts ... so furious a thirst that it suffocates itself in order to quench it”
(ibid.).

Again utter nonsense.

Morelly:

“Ceux qui pretendent regler les mceurs et dieter des lois”, etc.e

Herr Griin:

“Those who pretend to control our morals and dictate our laws”, etc. (p. 275).

All three mistakes occur in a single passage of Morelly which takes
up fourteen lines in Herr Griin’s book. In his exposition of Morelly
there are also numerous plagiarisms from Villegardelle/

a Morelly, Code de la Nature. Avec Vanalyse raisonnee du Systeme social de Morelly par
Villegardelle. — Ed.

b In the article “Ausziige aus Morelly’s Code de la Nature”. — Ed.
c “Self-interest perverts the heart and embitters our dearest ties, transforming them
into heavy chains, which in our society married couples detest and at the same time detest
themselves. ” — Ed.

“Our soul contracts such a terrific thirst that it chokes in quenching it.” — Ed.
e “Those who claim to control our morals and dictate our laws”, etc. — Ed.

1 This sentence is omitted in the Westphalische Dampfboot. — Ed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Historiography

529

Herr Grim is able to sum up all his knowledge of the eighteenth
century and of the Revolution in the following lines:

“Sensualism, deism and theism together stormed the old world. The old world
crumbled. When a new world came to be built, deism was victorious in the Constituent
Assembly, theism in the Convention, while pure sensualism was beheaded or silenced”
(p. 263).

Here we have the philosophic habit of dismissing history with a
few categories proper to ecclesiastical history; Herr Grim reduces it
to its basest form, to a mere literary phrase, which serves only to
adorn his plagiarisms. Avis aux philosophes /a

We skip Herr Griin’s remarks about communism. His historical
notes are copied from Cabet’s brochures, and the Voyage en Icarie is
viewed from the standpoint adopted by true socialism (cf. Biirgerbuch
and Rheinische Jahrbiicher) .b Herr Grim shows his knowledge of
French, and at the same time of English, conditions by calling Cabet
the “communist O’Connell of France” (p. 382), and then says:

“He would be ready to have me hanged if he had the power and knew what I think
and write about him. These agitators are dangerous for men such as us, because their
intelligence is limited ” (p. 382).

PROUDHON

“Herr Stein revealed his intellectual poverty in no uncertain way by treating
Proudhon en bagatelle ” (cf. Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 84c). “One needs something
more than Hegel’s old twaddle to follow this logic incarnate” (p. 411).

A few examples may show that Herr Grim remains true to his
nature in this section too.

He translates (on pages 437-44) several excerpts from the
economic arguments adduced by Proudhon to prove that property is
intolerable and finally exclaims:

“To this critique of property, which is the complete liquidation of property, we need
add nothing. We have no desire to write a new critique, abolishing in its turn equality
of production and the isolation of equal workers. I have already in an earlier passage
indicated what is necessary. The rest” (that is, what Herr Grim has not indicated) “we
shall see when society is rebuilt, when true property relations are established”
(p. 444).

In this way Herr Grim tries to avoid a close investigation of
Proudhon’s economic arguments and, at the same time, to rise
superior to them. Proudhon’s whole set of proofs is wrong; however,
Herr Grim will realise that, as soon as someone else has proved it.

d A warning to the philosophers! — Ed.

Karl Griin, “Feuerbach und dieSocialisten” and “Politik und Sozialismus”. — Ed.
c Moses Hess, “Socialismus und Communismus” — Ed.

530

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

The comments on Proudhon made in Die heilige Familie — in
particular those stressing that Proudhon criticises political economy
from the standpoint of political economy, and law from the legal
standpoint* — are copied by Herr Grim. But he has understood so
little of the problem that he omits the essential point, [namely] that
Proudhon vindicates the illusions cherished by jurists and economists
[as against] their practice; with regard to the foregoing statement he
produces a set of nonsensical [phrases].

The most important thing in Proudhon’s book De la creation de
Vordre dans Vhumanite'vs his dialectique serielle, the attempt to establish
a method of thought in which the process of thinking is substituted for
independent thoughts. Proudhon is looking, from the French
standpoint, for a dialectic method such as Hegel has indeed given us.
A relationship with Hegel therefore exists here really and does not
need to be constructed by means of some imaginative analogy. It
would have been an easy matter to offer a criticism of Proudhon’s
dialectics if the criticism of Hegel’s had been mastered. But this was
hardly to be expected of the true socialists, since the philosopher
Feuerbach himself, to whom they lay claim, did not manage to
produce one. Herr Grtin makes a highly diverting attempt to shirk
his task. At the very moment when he should have brought his heavy
German artillery into play, he decamps with an indecent gesture.
First of all he fills several pages with translations, and then explains
to Proudhon, with boisterous literary captatio benevolentiae,h that his
dialectique serielle is merelv an excuse for showing off his learning. He
does indeed try to console Proudhon by addressing him as follows:

“Ah, my dear friend, make no mistake about being a man of learning ” (or “tutor").
“We have had to forget everything that our school-masters and our university hacks”
(with the exception of Stein, Reybaud and Cabet) “have tried to impart to us with such
infinite labour and to our mutual disgust” (p. [457]).

As a proof that now Herr Grtin no longer absorbs knowledge
“with such infinite labour”, although perhaps with just as much
“disgust”, we may note that he begins his socialist studies and letters
in Paris on November 6th [and] by the following January 20th has
“inevitably” [not] only concluded his studies but has also finished the
[exposition of] his

“really complete impression of the entire process”.

a See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 31-34. — Ed.
Attempt to win good will. — Ed.

“DOCTOR GEORG KUHLMANN OF HOLSTEIN”

THE PROPHECIES OF TRUE SOCIALISM

DIE NEUE WELT ODER DAS REICH DES GEISTES AUF ERDEN.

VER K UNDIG UNO3 143

“A man was needed” (so runs the preface) “who would give utterance to all our
sorrows, all our longings and all our hopes, to everything, in a word, which moves our
age most deeply. And in the midst of this stress and turmoil of doubt and of longing
he had to emerge from the solitude of the spirit bearing the solution of the riddle, the
living symbols of which encompass us all. This man, whom our age was awaiting, has
appeared. He is Dr. Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein .”

August Becker, the writer of these lines, thus allowed himself to be
persuaded, by a person of a very simple mind and very ambiguous
character, that not a single riddle has yet been solved, not a single
vital energy aroused — that the communist movement, which has
already gripped all civilised countries, is an empty nut whose kernel
cannot be discovered; that it is a universal egg, laid by some great
universal hen without the aid of a cock — whereas the true kernel and
the true cock of the walk is Dr. Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein!...

This great universal cock turns out, however, to be a perfectly
ordinary capon who has fed for a while on the German artisans in
Switzerland and who cannot escape his due fate.

Far be it from us to consider Dr. Kuhlmann of Holstein to be a
commonplace charlatan and a cunning fraud, who does not himself
believe in the efficacy of his elixir of life and who merely applies his
science of longevity to the preservation of life in his own body — no,
we are well aware that the inspired doctor is a spiritualistic charlatan,
a pious fraud, a mystical old fox, but one who, like all his kind, is none
too scrupulous in his choice of means, since his own person is
intimately connected with his sacred mission. Indeed, sacred
missions are always intimately bound up with the holy beings who

a The New World, or The Kingdom of the Spirit upon Earth. Annunciation. — Ed.

532

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

pursue them; for such missions are of a purely idealistic nature and
exist only in the mind. All idealists, philosophic and religious, ancient
and modern, believe in inspirations, in revelations, saviours,
miracle-workers; whether their belief takes a crude, religious, or a
refined, philosophic, form depends only upon their cultural level,
just as the degree of energy which they possess, their character, their
social position, etc., determine whether their attitude to a belief in
miracles is a passive or an active one, i.e., whether they are shepherds
performing miracles or whether they are sheep; they further
determine whether the aims they pursue are theoretical or practical.

Kuhlmann is a very energetic person and a man of some
philosophic education; his attitude to miracles is by no means a
passive one and the aims which he pursues are very practical.

All that August Becker has in common with him is the national
infirmity of mind. The good fellow

“pities those who cannot bring themselves to see that the will and the ideas of an
age can only be expressed by individuals”.

For the idealist, every movement designed to transform the world
exists only in the head of some chosen being, and the fate of the
world depends on whether this head, which is endowed with all
wisdom as its own private property, is or is not mortally wounded by
some realistic stone before it has had time to make its revelation.

“Or is this not the case?” adds August Becker defiantly. “Assemble all the
philosophers and the theologians of the age, let them take counsel and register their
votes, and then see what comes of it all!”

The whole of historical development consists, according to the
ideologist, in the theoretical abstractions of that development which
have taken shape in the “heads” of all “the philosophers and
theologians of the age”, and since it is impossible to “assemble” all
these “heads” and induce them to “take counsel and register their
votes”, there must of necessity be one sacred head, the apex of all
these philosophical and theological heads, and this top head is the
speculative unity of all these block-heads — the saviour.

This “cranium” system is as old as the Egyptian pyramids, with
which it has many similarities, and as new as the Prussian monarchy,
in the capital of which it has recently been resurrected in a
rejuvenated form. The idealistic Dalai Lamas have this much in
common with their real counterpart: they would like to persuade
themselves that the world from which they derive their subsistence
could not continue without their holy excrement. As soon as this
idealistic folly is put into practice, its malevolent nature is apparent: its
clerical lust for power, its religious fanaticism, its charlatanry, its

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Prophecies of True Socialism 533

pietistic hypocrisy, its unctuous deceit. Miracles are the asses’ bridge
leading from the kingdom of the idea to practice. Dr. Georg
Kuhlmann of Holstein is just such an asses’ bridge — he is in-
spired— his magic words cannot fail to move the most stable of
mountains. How consoling for those patient creatures who cannot
summon up enough energy to blast these mountains with natural
powder ! What a source of confidence to the blind and timorous who
cannot see the material coherence which underlies the diverse
scattered manifestations of the revolutionary movement!

“There has been lacking, up to now, a rallying point,” says August Becker.

Saint George overcomes all concrete obstacles with the greatest of
ease by transforming all concrete things into ideas; he then
pronounces himself the speculative unity of the latter, and this
enables him to “rule and regulate them”:

“The society of ideas is the world. And their unity regulates and rules the world”
(p. 138).

Our prophet wields all the power he can possibly desire in this
“society of ideas”.

“Led by our own idea, we will wander, hither and thither, and contemplate
everything in the minutest detail, as far as our time requires” (p. 138).

What a speculative unity of nonsense!

But paper is long-suffering, and the German public, to whom the
prophet issued his oracular pronouncements, knew so little of the
philosophic development in its own country that it did not even
notice how, in his speculative oracular pronouncements, the great
prophet merely reiterated the most decrepit philosophic phrases and
adapted them to his practical aims.

Just as medical miracle-workers and miraculous cures are made
possible by ignorance of the laws of the natural world, so social
miracle-workers and miraculous social cures depend upon ignorance
of the laws of the social world — and the witch-doctor of Holstein is
none other than the socialistic miracle-working shepherd of
Niederempt.

The first revelation which this miracle-working shepherd makes to
his flock is as follows:

“I see before me an assembly of the elect, who have gone before me to work by word
and deed for the salvation of our time, and who are now come to hear what / have to
say concerning the weal and woe of mankind.”

“Many have already spoken and written in the name of mankind, but none has yet
given utterance to the real nature of man’s suffering, his hopes and his expectations,
nor told him how he may obtain his desires. That is precisely what / shall do.”

534

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

And his flock believes him.

There is not a single original thought in the whole work of this
“Holy Spirit”; he reduces out-of-date socialistic theories to abstrac-
tions of the most sterile and general kind. There is nothing original
even in the form, the style. Others have imitated more happily the
sanctified style of the Bible. Kuhlmann has taken Lamennais’
manner of writing as his model, but he merely achieves a caricature
of Lamennais. We shall give our readers a sample of the beauties of
his style:

“Tell me, firstly, how feel ye when ye think of your eternal lot?

“Many indeed mock and say: ‘What have I to do with eternity?’

“Others rub their eyes and ask: ‘F.ternity — what may this be.-'...’

“How feel ye, when ye think of the hour when the grave shall swallow you up?”
“And I hear many voices.” One among them speaks in this wise:

“Of recent years it hath been taught that the spirit is eternal, that in death it is only-
dissolved once more in God, from whom it proceedeth. But they who preach such
things cannot tell me what then remaineth of me. Oh, that I had never seen the light
of day! And assuming that I do not die — oh, my parents, my sisters, my brothers, my
children, and all whom I love, shall I ever see you again? Oh, had I but never seen
vou!” etc.

“How feel ye, further, if ye think of infinity?”...

We feel very poorly, Herr Kuhlmann — not at the thought of death,
but at your fantastic idea of death, at your style, at the shabby means you
employ to work upon the feelings of others.

“How dost feel,” dear reader, when you hear a priest who paints
hell very hot to terrify his sheep and make their minds very flabby, a
priest whose eloquence only aims at stimulating the tear glands of his
hearers and who speculates only on the cowardice of his congrega-
tion?

As far as the meagre content of the “Annunciation” is concerned,
the first section, or the introduction to the Neue Welt, can be
reduced to the simple thought that Herr Kuhlmann has come from
Holstein to found the “Kingdom of the Spirit”, the “ Kingdom of
Heaven" upon earth; that he was the first to know the real hell and
the real heaven — the former being society as it has hitherto existed
and the latter being future society, the “Kingdom of the
Spirit” — and that he himself is the longed-for holy “spirit”....

None of these great thoughts of Saint George are exactly original
and there was really no need for him to have bothered to come all the
way from Holstein to Switzerland, nor to have descended from the
“solitude of the spirit” to the level of the artisans, nor to have
“revealed” himself, merely in order to present this “vision” to the
“world”.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Prophecies of True Socialism 535

However, the idea that Dr. Kuhlmann of Holstein is the “longed-for
holy spirit” is his own exclusive property — and is likely to remain so.

According to Saint George’s own “revelation”, his Holy Scripture
will progress in the following way:

“It will reveal” (he says) “the Kingdom of the Spirit in its earthly guise, that ye may
behold its glory and see that there is no other salvation but in the Kingdom of the
Spirit. On the other hand, it will expose your vale of tears that ye may behold your
wretchedness and know the cause of all your sufferings. Then I shall show the way
which leads from this sorrowful present to a joyful future. To this end, follow me in
the spirit to a height, whence we may have a free prospect over the broad landscape.”

And so the prophet permits us first of all a glimpse of his “beautiful
landscape”,3 his Kingdom of Heaven. We see nothing but a misunder-
standing of Saint-Simonism, wretchedly staged, with costumes that
are a travesty of Lamennais, embellished with fragments from Herr
Stein.

We shall now quote the most important revelations from the
Kingdom of Heaven, which demonstrate the prophetic method. For
example, page 37:

“The choice is free and depends on each person’s inclinations. Inclinations depend
on one’s natural faculties.”

“If in society,” Saint George prophesies, “everyone follows his inclination, all the
faculties of society without exception will be developed and if this is so, that which all
need will continually be produced, in the realm of the spirit as in the realm of matter.
For society always possesses as many faculties and energies as it has needs”... “Les
attractions sont proportionelles aux Destinies" (c f. also Proudhon).

Herr Kuhlmann differs here from the socialists and the commu-
nists only by reason of a misunderstanding, the cause of which must be
sought in his pursuit of practical aims and undoubtedly also in his
narrow-mindedness. He confuses the diversity of faculties and
capacities with the inequality of possessions and of enjoyment con-
ditioned by possession, and inveighs therefore against communism.

“No one shall have there” (that is, under communism) “any advantage over
another”, declaims the prophet, “no one shall have more possessions and live better than
another.... And if you cherish doubts about it and fail to join in their vociferation, they
will abuse you, condemn you, and persecute you and hang you on a gallows” (p. 100).

Kuhlmann sometimes prophesies quite correctly, one must admit.

“In their ranks then are to be found all those who cry: Away with the Bible! Away,
above all, with the Christian religion, for it is the religion of humility and servility!
Away with all belief whatsoever! We know nothing of God or immortality! They are

3 The phrase “beautiful landscape” ( schone Gegend) originated from a story about a
woman who, trying to console the mother of a soldier killed in the Battle of Leipzig
(1813), said: But it was a beautiful landscape. — Ed.

b The attractions correspond to the destinies. See Charles Fourier, Theorie des
quatre mouvements et des destinies generates. — Ed.

1 9 -2086

536

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

but figments of the imagination, exploited and continually concocted by deceivers and
liars for their advantage” (it should read: which are exploited by the priests for their
advantage). “In sooth, he who still believes in such things is the greatest of fools!”

Kuhlmann attacks with particular vehemence those who are on
principle opposed to the doctrine of faith, humility and inequality , i.e.,
the doctrine of “ difference of rank and birth'\

His socialism is based on the abject doctrine of predestined
slavery — which, as formulated by Kuhlmann, reminds one strongly
of Friedrich Rohmer — on the theocratic hierarchy and, in the last
instance, on his own sacred person !

“Every branch of labour,” we find on page 42, “is directed by the most skilled
worker, who himself takes part in it, and in the realm of enjoyment every branch is
guided by the merriest member, who himself participates in the enjoyment. But, as
society is undivided and possesses only one mind, the whole system will be regulated
and governed by one man — and he shall be the wisest, the most virtuous and the most
blissful.”

On page 34 we learn:

“If man strives after virtue in the spirit, then he stirs and moves his limbs and
develops and moulds and forms everything in and outside himself according to his
pleasure. And if he experiences well-being in the spirit, then he must also experience it in
everything that lives in him. Therefore, man eats and drinks and takes delight therein:
therefore, he sings, plays and dances, he kisses, weeps and laughs.”

The knowledge of the influence which the vision of God exerts on
the appetite, and which spiritual blissfulness exerts upon the sex impulse
is, indeed, not the private property of Kuhlmannism; but it does
shed light on many an obscure passage in the prophet.

For example, page 36:

“Both” (possession and enjoyment) “correspond to his labour” (that is, to man’s
labour). “Labour is the measure of his needs.” (In this way, Kuhlmann distorts the
proposition that a communist society has, on the whole, always as many faculties and
energies as needs.) “For labour is the expression of the ideas and the instincts. And
needs are based on them. But. since the faculties and needs of men are always
different, and so apportioned that the former can only be developed and the latter
satisfied, if each continually labours for all and the product of the labour of all is
exchanged and apportioned in accordance with the deserts” (?) “of each — for this
reason each receives only the value of his labour.”

The whole of this tautological rigmarole would be — like the
following sentences and many others which we spare the reader — ut-
terly incomprehensible, despite the “sublime simplicity and clarity ” of
the “revelation” so praised by A. Becker, if we had not a key in the
shape of the practical aims which the prophet is pursuing. This makes
everything at once comprehensible.

“Value,” continues Herr Kuhlmann like an oracle, “determines itself according to
the need of all.” (?) “In value the work of each is always contained and for it” (?) “he
can procure for himself whatever his heart desires.”

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Prophecies of True Socialism 537

“See, my friends,” runs page 39, “the society of true men always regards life as a
school ... in which man must educate himself. And thereby it wants to attain bliss. But
such” (?) “must become evident and visible” (?), “otherwise it” (?) “is impossible .”

What Herr Georg Kuhlmann of Holstein has in view when he says
that “such” (life? or bliss?) must “become evident” and “visible”,
because “it” would otherwise be “impossible” — that “labour” is
“contained in value” and that one can procure for it (for what?) one’s
heart’s desire — and finally, that “value” determines itself according
to “need” — all this cannot be understood unless one once again takes
into account the crux of the whole revelation, the practical point of it
all.

Let us therefore try to offer a practical explanation.

We learn from August Becker that Saint George Kuhlmann of
Holstein had no success in his own country. He arrives in Switzerland
and finds there an entirely “new world”, the communist societies of
the German artisans. That is more to his taste — and he attaches
himself without delay to communism and the communists. He
always, as August Becker tells us, “worked unremittingly to develop
his doctrine further and to make it adequate to the greatness of the
times”, i.e., he became a communist among the communists ad
majorem Dei gloriam.

So far everything had gone well.

But one of the most vital principles of communism, a principle
which distinguishes it from all reactionary socialism, is its empirical
view, based on a knowledge of man’s nature, that differences of brain
and of intellectual ability do not imply any differences whatsoever in
the nature of the stomach and of physical needs ; therefore the false
tenet, based upon existing circumstances, “to each according to his
abilities”, must be changed, insofar as it relates to enjoyment in its
narrower sense, into the tenet, “to each according to his need J”; in other
words, a different form of activity, of labour, does not justify inequality,
confers no privileges in respect of possession and enjoyment.

The prophet could not admit this; for the privileges, the
advantages of his station, the feeling of being a chosen one, these are
the very stimulus of the prophet.

“But such must become evident and visible, otherwise it is impossible.”

Without practical advantages, without some tangible stimulus, the
prophet would not be a prophet at all, he would not be a practical, but
only a theoretical, man of God, a philosopher. The prophet must,
therefore, make the communists understand that different forms of
activity or labour give the right to different degrees of value and of
bliss (or of enjoyment, merit, pleasure, it is all the same thing), and

19*

538

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

since each determines his own bliss and his labour, therefore, he, the
prophet — this is the practical point of the revelation — can claim a
better life than the common artisan .*

After this, all the prophet’s obscure passages become clear: that
the “possession” and “enjoyment” of each should correspond to his
“labour”; that the “labour” of each man should be the measure of
his “needs”; that, therefore, each should receive the “value” of his
labour; that “value” will determine itself according to “need”; that
the work of each is “contained” in value and that he can procure for
it what his “heart” desires; that, finally, the “bliss” of the chosen one
must “become evident and visible”, because it is otherwise “impossi-
ble”. All this nonsense has now become intelligible.

We do not know the exact extent of the practical demands which
Dr. Kuhlmann really makes upon the artisans. But we do know that
his doctrine is a dogma fundamental to all spiritual and temporal
craving for power, a mystic veil which is used to conceal all
hypocritical pleasure-seeking; it serves to extenuate any infamy and
is the source of many incongruous actions.

We must not omit to show the reader the way which, according to
Herr Kuhlmann of Holstein, “leads from this sorrowful present to a
joyful future”. This way is lovely and delightful as spring in a
flowery meadow or as a flowery meadow in spring.

'‘Softly and gently, with sun-warmed fingers, it puts forth buds, the buds become
flowers, the lark and the nightingale warble, the grasshopper in the grass is roused.
Let the new world come like the spring” (p. 114 et seq.).

The prophet paints the transition from present social isolation to
communal life in truly idyllic colours. Just as he has transformed real
society into a “society of ideas”, so that “led by his own idea he
should be able to wander hither and thither, and contemplate
everything in the minutest detail, as far as his time requires”, so he
transforms the real social movement which, in all civilised countries,
already proclaims the approach of a terrible social upheaval into a
process of comfortable and peaceful conversion, into a still life which will
permit the owners and rulers of the world to slumber peacefully. For
the idealist, the theoretical abstractions of real events, their ideal signs,
are reality; real events are merely “ signs that the old world is going to
its doom”.

“Wherefore do ye strive so anxiously for the things of the moment,” scolds the
prophet on page 118, “they are nothing more than signs that the old world is going to

* The prophet has moreover openly stated this in a lecture which has not been
printed.

The German Ideology. True Socialism. Prophecies of True Socialism 539

its doom; and wherefore do ye dissipate your strength in strivings which cannot fulfil
your hopes and expectations?”

“Ye shall not tear down nor destroy that which ye find in your path, ye shall rather
shun it and abandon it. And when ye have shunned it and abandoned it, then it shall
cease to exist of itself, for it shall find no other nourishment.”

“If ye seek truth and spread light abroad, then lying and darkness will vanish from
your midst” (p. 116).

“But there will be many who will say: ‘How shall we build a new life as long as the
old order prevails and hinders us? Must it not first be destroyed?’ ‘By no means,’
answers the wisest, the most virtuous and the most blissful man. ‘By no means. If ye
dwell with others in a house that has become rotten and is too small and
uncomfortable for you, and the others wish to remain in it, then ye shall not pull it
down and dwell in the open, but ye shall first build a new house, and when it is ready
ye shall enter it and abandon the old to its fate’” (p. 120).

The prophet now gives two pages of rules as to how one can
insinuate oneself into the new world. Then he becomes aggressive:

“But it is not enough that ye should stand together and forsake the old world — ye
shall also take up arms against it to make war upon it and to extend your kingdom and
strengthen it. Not by the use of force, however, but rather by the use of free persuasion.”

But if nevertheless it comes about that one has to take up a real
sword and hazard one’s real life “to conquer heaven by force”, the
prophet promises his sacred host a Russian immortality (the Russians
believe that they will rise again in their respective localities if they are
killed in battle by the enemy):

“And they who shall fall by the wayside shall be born anew and shall rise more
beauteous than they were before. Therefore” (therefore) “take no thought for your
life and fear not death” (p. 129).

Even in a conflict with real weapons, says the prophet reassuringly
to his sacred host, you do not really risk your life; you merely pretend
to risk it.

The prophet’s doctrine is in every sense sedative. After these
samples of his Holy Scripture one cannot wonder at the applause it
has met with among certain easy-going slowcoaches.

Frederick Engels

[THE TRUE SOCIALISTS144]

Since the above descriptions of the true socialists were written,
several months have elapsed. During this period true socialism,
which so far had sprung up only sporadically here and there, has
experienced a spectacular upsurge. It has found representatives in
all parts of the Fatherland, it has even attained a certain significance
as a literary party. Furthermore, it is already divided into several
groups which, although firmly linked by the common bond of Ger-
man sincerity and scientific spirit, and by common efforts and aims,
are nevertheless definitely separated from one another by the parti-
cular individuality of each of them. In this way the “chaotic mass of
light” — as Herr Grim beautifully phrases it — of true socialism has in
the course of time passed into a state of “orderly brightness”; it has
become concentrated into stars and constellations in whose mild and
calm radiance the German burgher can light-heartedly ponder over
his plans for honest acquisition of a small property and his hopes for
the elevation of the lower classes of the nation.

We must not leave true socialism without at least taking a closer
look at the most developed of these groups. We shall see how each of
them at first appears hazily in the Milky Way of universal love of
mankind, later, as a result of the occurrence of acid fermentation,
the “true enthusiasm for mankind” (as Herr Dr. Liming, who is
certainly a competent authority, expresses it), constitutes itself as a
distinct flake and separates from the bourgeois-liberal whey; we shall
see how it figures for a period as a nebula in the socialist heavens,
and how the nebula increases in size and brightness and finally, like a
sky-rocket, divides into a sparkling group of stars and constellations.

The oldest group, the earliest to develop independently, is that of
Westphalian socialism. Thanks to the extremely important scuffles
between this group and the royal Prussian police, and thanks to the

The True Socialists

541

zeal for publicity shown by these Westphalian men of progress, the
German public has had the advantage of being able to read the whole
history of this group in the Kolnische, the Trier’sche and other
newspapers. Here, therefore, we need only mention what is most
essential.

Westphalian socialism originated in the area of Bielefeld, in the
Teutoburg Woods. The newspapers at the time contained mysteri-
ous allusions to the mystical nature of its earliest period. But it
quickly passed through the stage of a nebula; with the first issue of
the Westphdlische Dampfboot a it opened out and disclosed to the
astonished eye a host of sparkling stars. We find ourselves north of
the equator and, as an old couplet says:

In the North you can see the Ram and the Bull,

The Twins, Crab, Lion, and the Virgin as well.

At a very early date the “good press”*5 asserted the existence of the
“Virgins"-, the “Lion” was the very same Arminius the Cheruscan,
who shortly after the Westphalian nebula had opened out left his
dear friends and now as a tribune of the people145 shakes his blond
mane from America. In a short while he was followed by the Crab
“on account of an unpleasant exchange business”, whereby West-
phalian socialism became a widow, but it nevertheless carries on. Of
the Twins, one also went to America, in order to found a colony;
while he disappeared there, the other twin discovered “the national
economy in its future form“c (cf. Liming, Dies Buck gehort dem Volke,
II. Jahrg.). All these figures, however, are comparatively unimpor-
tant. The main weight of the group is concentrated in the Ram and
the Bull, those genuinely Westphalian stars, under whose protection
the Westphdlische Dampfboot safely cleaves the waves.

The Westphdlische Dampfboot adhered for a long time to the mode
simple of true socialism. “Not an hour of the night passed”d in which
it did not shed bitter tears over the misery of suffering humanity. It
preached the gospel of man — of the true man, of the true real man,
of the true, real corporeal man — with all its strength, but this, of
course, was not particularly great. It had a soft nature and liked
milky rice-pudding more than Spanish pepper. Hence its criticisms
were of a very gentle nature and it preferred to side with equally

a Westphalian Steamboat. — Ed.

The term is used in an order in council which was issued by Frederick William IV
on October 14, 1842. — Ed.

c An allusion to J. Meyer’s article “Die Volkswirthschaftslehre in heutiger und
zukiinftiger Gestaltung”. — Ed.

( A line from the German folk-song “Wenn ich ein Voglein war”. — Ed.

542

Frederick Engels

merciful and loving reviewers rather than with the heartless, cold
severity of judgment that was now coming to the fore. But since it
had a big heart and little courage even the unfeeling Heilige Familie
found favour in its eyes.3 It reported with the greatest conscientious-
ness the various phases of the Bielefeld, Munster, etc., local
associations for elevating the working classes.146 The greatest
attention was devoted to the important happenings in the Bielefeld
Museum. And in order that the Westphalian townsman and villager
should know how matters stood, at the end of each issue, in the
monthly review of “World Events”, praise was bestowed on the same
liberals who had been attacked in the other articles of that issue.
Incidentally, the Westphalian townsman and villager were also told
that Queen Victoria gave birth to a child, that the plague raged in
Egypt and that the Russians had lost a battle in the Caucasus.

It is clear that the Westphdlische Dampfboot was a periodical which
fully deserved the thanks of all well-meaning persons and the
overflowing praise of Herr Fr. Schnake in the Gesellschaftsspiegel.b
With smiling satisfaction the Bull performed his editing on the
marshy meadow of true socialism. Although the censor at times cut
into his flesh, he never had need to sigh: “that was the best passage”;
the Westphalian bull was a draught animal and not a bull kept for
breeding. Even the Rheinische Beobachter has never dared to reproach
either the Westphdlische Dampfboot in general, or Dr. Otto Liming in
particular, with offending against morality. In short, one can assume
that the Dampfboot, which since the Weser was forbidden to itc floats
only on the mythical river Eridanus147 transposed among the stars
(for no other water flows at Bielefeld), that the Dampfboot has
attained the highest degree of human perfection.

But in all its efforts so far the Dampfboot had only developed the
simplest phase of true socialism. Towards the summer of 1846 it left
the sign of the Bull and approached that of the Ram, or rather, to
put it more correctly historically, the Ram approached it. The Ram
was a much-travelled man and fully at the height of his time. He
explained to the Bull how things now stood in the world, that “real
relations” were now the main thing and that, therefore, a new turn
had to be made. The Bull was in complete agreement with him and
from that moment the Westphdlische Dampfboot has offered a still
more elevating spectacle: the mode compose of true socialism.

3 An allusion to a review in the Westphdlische Dampfboot entitled “Die heilige Fami-
lie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten.Von F. Engels
und K. Marx”. — Ed.

Friedrich Schnake, Das Westphdlische Dampfboot. — Ed.

c An allusion to the suppression of the journal Weser-Dampfboot. — Ed.

The True Socialists

543

The “Ram and the Bull” thought that there could be no better way
of carrying out this graceful turn than by printing our criticism of
the New York Volks-Tribun ,a which we had sent to the newspaper in
manuscript and which had been accepted by it.148 The Dampfboot,
which now did not shrink from attacking its own Lion, who was far
off in America (the mode compose of true socialism shows far more
audacity than the mode simple), was moreover cunning enough to
attach the following philanthropic remark to the above-mentioned
criticism:

“If anyone cares to see in the above article a self-criticism ” (?!) “of the Dampfboot,
we have nothing against it.”

Thereby the mode compose of true socialism is adequately intro-
duced and it now goes forward at full gallop on the new course. The
Ram, a bellicose creature by nature, cannot rest content with the
previous good-natured kind of criticism; the new bell-wether of the
Westphalian flock of lambs is seized with the lust of battle and,
before his more timid comrades can prevent him, he sets off with
lowered horns against Dr. Georg Schirges in Hamburg. Earlier, the
helmsmen of the Dampfboot did not look upon Dr. Schirges with such
disfavour, but things have become different now. Poor Dr. Schirges
represents the mode simplicissimus of true socialism, and the mode
compose does not forgive him this simplicity, which quite recently it
still shared with him. In the September 1846 issue of the Dampfboot,
pp. 409-14, the Ram therefore drives the most merciless breaches in
the walls of his Werkstatt.h Let us enjoy the spectacle for a moment.

Some true socialists and soi-disant communists have translated
Fourier’s brilliant satires on the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie,
insofar as they are acquainted with them, into the language of
German bourgeois morality. In this connection they discovered the
theory of the misfortune of the rich, already known to the men of the
Enlightenment and fable-writers of the last century, and thus
obtained material for the most inexhaustible moral tirades. Dr.
Georg Schirges, who is not yet sufficiently deeply initiated into the
mysteries of the true doctrine, is by no means of the opinion that
“the rich are just as unhappy as the poor”. For this reason, the
Westphalian bell-wether deals him an indignant blow such as is
deserved by a man whom “winning a lottery ... could make the
happiest and most satisfied man in the world”.

a Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Circular against Kriege” (see present
edition, Vol. 6). — Ed.

b Joseph Weydemeyer, “Die Werkstatt; redigirt von Georg Schirges”. — Ed.

544

Frederick Engels

“Yes,” cries our stoic Ram, “despite Herr Schirges, it is true that possessions are
not enough to make people happy, and that a very large section of the rich ... are
anything but happy.” (You are right, honest Ram, health is a treasure which no
amount of gold can outweigh.) “Even though he does not have to suffer hunger and
cold, there are other evils” (for instance, venereal diseases, persistent rainy weather,
and in Germany sometimes pricks of conscience as well), “whose pressure he cannot
escape.” (Especially, there is no cure for death.) “A glance at the inner life of most
families ... it is all foul and rotten.... The husband is wholly absorbed in stock exchange
and business deals” ( beatus ille qui procul negotiif — it is astounding that the poor fellow
has enough time left over to produce a few children) ... “degraded into a slave of
money” (the poor fellow!), “the wife fashioned into an empty” (except when she is
pregnant) “shallow drawing-room lady, or brought up to be a good housewife who has
no interest in anything except cooking, washing and looking after children” (is the
Ram still speaking of the “rich”?) “and at most a few gossiping parties” (we are, one
sees, still on exclusively German soil, where the “good housewife” has the best
opportunity to devote herself to what “she has interest in”; grounds enough to be
thoroughly “unhappy”); “the two are moreover often in a state of incessant war
against each other ... even the bond between parents and children is often broken by
social conditions”, etc., etc.

Our author has forgotten the worst suffering. Any “rich” German
head of a family could tell him that in the course of time matrimonial
discord may become a need, that unsuccessful children can be sent to
Batavia and forgotten, but that thieving and disobedient servants are
an intolerable and, in the circumstances of the increasing demorali-
sation of the common man and woman, nowadays an almost inevi-
table “evil”.

If Messieurs Rothschild, Fulchiron and Decazes in Paris, Samuel
Jones Lloyd, Baring and Lord Westminster in London, were to read
this description of the woes of the “rich”, how they would sym-
pathise with the good Westphalian Ram.

“However, if one proves” (as was done earlier) “that the pressure of our
conditions” (namely the atmospheric pressure of 15 lbs per square inch) “weighs also
on the rich, if not quite so strongly as on the poor, one obtains as a result — which
follows from the description of our conditions and circumstances in general — the
enlightenment of everyone who seeks to become acquainted with it.” (It almost seems
that from the mode compose of true socialism still less “results” than from the mode
simple.) “From the dissatisfaction of the rich, of course, no revolution in favour of the
proletarians will arise, that requires more powerful mainsprings” (namely writers’
pens); “ moreover , it is not accomplished with the words: ‘Be embraced, ye millions, this
kiss to the whole world’c; but it is just as little use to torment oneself with patchwork
and palliatives” (such as attempts at reconciliation in the above unhappy household)
“and to forget entirely the big thing, the real reforms” (apparently a divorce).

* Happy is he who is far removed from business affairs. Horace, Epodes, II, I. — Ed.
A pun in the original: Triebfeder — mainspring, motive; Schreibfeder —

pen . — Ed.

c From Schiller’s poem “An die Freude”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

545

The combination of the above “of course” with the following
“moreover” and “but ... just as little” affords “of course” a
lamentable example of the confusion which the transition from
simple to complex true socialism brings about in the mind of a
Westphalian; “moreover” our sorrow will not be lessened when we
read on the next page (p. 413) that “in the politically developed
countries ... there exists a state of things without any limitation”, “but
just as little” does it testify to the historical knowledge of
Westphalian socialism that according to the same page “egoism ... in
the most brilliant period of the Revolution, in the period of the
Convention, was not seldom even punished ” — probably by flogging.
However, “we have no 'grounds for expecting anything better from
the further activity of ‘our Ram’, and will, therefore, not so soon
return to it”.

Let us rather take a look at the Bull. He has meanwhile been
occupied with “world events”, and on page 421 (September 1846) he
raises “solely questions which have to be raised” and plunges
headlong into the sort of politics that M. Guizot, following the
Charivari, has given the nickname of “great” politics. Here, too, the
progress compared to the earlier period of simple socialism is
obvious. Below are a few examples.

The rumour has reached Westphalia that the Prussian Govern-
ment, owing to the financial difficulties in which it finds itself, could
very easily be compelled to grant a constitution. At the same time the
newspapers report that financial difficulties prevail on the Berlin
stock exchange. Our Westphalian draught bull, who is not very
strong in political economy, identifies tout bonnement the financial
difficulties of the Berlin Government with the quite different financial
difficulties of the Berlin commergants and elaborates the following
profound hypothesis:

“... perhaps already this year the provincial estates will be called together as estates
of the realm. For the financial difficulties remain the same, the bank seems unable to
find a remedy for them. Indeed, even the railway construction work that has been
begun and is being planned could be seriously endangered by the scarcity of money, in
which case the state could easily’ (o sancta simplicitas!) “be induced to take over certain
lines” (extremely clever), “which again is not possible without a loan.”

The last is quite true. In homely Westphalia people really believe
that they still live under a paternal government. Even our extreme
socialist of the mode compose believes the Prussian Government to be
naive enough to grant a constitution merely in order to get rid of the
difficulties of the Berlin Stock Exchange by means of a foreign loan.
Happy blind faith!

546

Frederick Engels

The sharp nose of our Westphalian draught bull is revealed at its
sharpest, however, in his remarks on foreign policy. A few months
ago the mode compose of true socialism got scent of the following new
Parisian and London mysteries, which we report for the amusement
of the reader:

September issue:

France. — “The Ministry has emerged victoriously from the elections, nothing else
was to be expected” (when has a Westphalian ever expected something “else” than
what “was to be expected”?). “Although it may have put into operation all the levers
of corruption, although it may have ... Henri’s attempt, enough — the old opposition
(Thiers, Barrot) suffered a serious defeat. But M. Guizot, too, will no longer be able to
count on such a compact and conservative party, voting for the Ministry quand meme;
for the conservative party too has split into two sections, into the conservateurs homes
with their periodicals Debats and Epoque, and the conservateurs progressifs with the Presse
as their organ.” (The Bull forgets only that it was M. Guizot himself, in his speech to
his electors in Lisieux,3 who was the first to exploit the phrase “progressive
conservatism”.) “In general ’ (here begins again the peculiar incoherence that was
already noticed above in the Ram, “as was to be expected”), “the abstract-political
party questions, which only turned on whether Thiers or Guizot should be the
Minister” (in Westphalia that is called “abstract-political party questions” and people
there still believe that in France up to now they have “turned only on that"), “will surely
to some extent be pushed into the background. The political economists Blanqui ...
have been elected to the Chamber and with them surely” (for the enlightenment of
the Westphalians) “questions of political economy also will come under discussion
there” (what an idea people in Westphalia must have of the “questions” that have so
far “come under discussion there”!). (Pp. 426, 427.)

Question: Why does the English aristocracy insist on flogging for
soldiers? Answer:

“If flogging were abolished, a different recruiting system would have to be
organised, and if one has better soldiers, then one needs also better officers ” (!!), “who owe
their position to merit and not to purchase or favour. For this reason the aristocracy is
against the ‘abolition of flogging’, because it would thereby lose one more bulwark,
provision for its ‘younger sons’. The middle class, however, follows up its advantage
step by step and it will achieve victory here as well.”

(What a myth! The campaigns of the British in India, Afghanistan,
etc., prove that at the present time they do not “need better
officers”, and the English middle class desires neither better officers
nor better soldiers, nor a different recruiting system, nor is it much
concerned about the abolition of flogging. But for some time past the
Dampfboot has noticed nothing in England except the struggle
between the middle class and the aristocracy.) (P. 428.)

October issue :

France. — “M. Thiers has lost the Constitutionnel, his organ for many years; the
newspaper has been bought by a conservative deputy and is now slowly and

a Francois Guizot, [Discours au Lisieux le 17 Juillet 1846], — Ed.

The True Socialists

547

imperceptibly” (indeed “perceptibly” only for the mode compose of true socialism)
“being brought into the conservative camp. M. Thiers, who earlier already threatened
that if things were made too uncomfortable for him he would take up his old pen
again in the National, is now said to have actually bought the National .”

(Unfortunately, the “ National of 1830” was a constitutional and
Orleanist National, quite different from the republican “ National of
1834”, which M. Thiers is “said to have actually bought” anno 1846.
Incidentally, the Dampfboot has been the victim of an irresponsible
piece of trickery. Some unscrupulous miscreant and enemy of the
good cause has passed several issues of the Corsaire-Satan on to the
editor, and now the Dampfboot prints bona fide as oracular truth the
current rumours that figure in this paper, which is by no means
sufficiently moral for Westphalian readers. How indeed could the
Dampfboot doubt that the Corsaire-Satan has at least as much moral
standing and consciousness of the lofty vocation of the press as it
itself?)

“Whether M. Thiers by this step has gone over to the republicans remains to be
seen.”

Honest Cheruscan, this “whether” you do not owe to the Corsaire ;
cela sent la foret teutobourgienne dune lieuel a On the other hand,
however, he allows himself to be induced by the Corsaire, which is
backing free trade, to attribute to the agitation for libre echange in
France a success and an importance which it is far from possessing.

“Our predictions that all industrial countries must go the same way and reach the
same goal as England ... seem, therefore, to be not so very incorrect, since they are
now coming true. And we ‘unpractical theoreticians’ seem, therefore, to know the real
conditions ” (hurrah!) “just as well as, and to judge them better than, the ‘practical men’
who so much like to boast about their experience and their knowledge of practical
conditions.”

Hapless Teutoburgian “theoreticians”! You do not even “know”
the “real conditions” of the Corsaire-Satanl (These beautiful things
occur on page 479.)

November issue :

France. — “Scientists are racking their brains in vain over the question of where the
frequently recurring floods originate. Some time ago, by a decree of the Academy, the
rustling forests on the mountains were cut down as being the cause of the evil; later they
were replanted, and the evil remained as before” (p. 522).

“In vain” would “scientists rack their brains” as to where the
greatest nonsense lies: 1) does the Westphalian believe that the
Academy in France can issue decrees and have forests cut down; 2)
does he believe that the forests are cut down not for the timber and

That smells of the Teutoburg Woods a mile off! — Ed.

548

Frederick Engels

the money from its sale, but on account of the floods; 3) does he
believe that the scientists rack their brains over the cause of these
floods; 4) does he believe that the forests were at any time regarded
as the cause of the floods when every child in France knows that it is
precisely the destruction of the forests that is the cause; and 5) does he
believe that the forests are replanted, while nowhere is so much
complaint made as in France over neglect of forests and ever more
extensive deforestation without regard for reforestation (cf., besides
specialised journals, Reforme, National, Democratie pacifique and
other papers of the opposition for October and November 1846).
The Westphalian Bull is unlucky in every respect. If he follows the
Corsaire -Satan he gets in a tangle; if he follows his own genius he gets
just as much in a tangle.

True socialism raised to the second power has, as we have seen,
performed great feats in the sphere of higher politics. What
perspicacity, what conjectures compared with the earlier reports on
“World Events”! What thorough knowledge of “real conditions”!
For the Dampfboot, however, the most important “real condition” is
the position of the royal Prussian officers. Lieutenant Anneke, who
for some time past has been unavoidable in the German periodical
press, the important discussion in the Bielefeld Museum about
carrying daggers, and the resulting Court of Honour proceedings,
etc., form the main content of the October and November issues. We
are also given interesting information about the Deutsche Zeitung
which did not come into existence, the French kingdom of beggars
that perished in the seventeenth century, and was described by
Monteil,3 and other equally “real” conditions. In between there
appears from time to time a multiplication sign, which still
completely represents the mode simple of true socialism and piles up
all its slogans with the greatest ingenuousness: German theory and
French practice should unite, communism should be put into effect
in order that humanism might be put into effect (pp. 455-58), etc.b
From time to time similar reminders of the past escape from the Ram
or even from the Bull himself, without however in the least
disturbing the divine harmony of the “real conditions”.

Let us now forsake the main body of the Westphalian army in
order to follow the manoeuvres of a detached corps which has
entrenched itself in the blessed Wupper Valley under the skirts of a

a Amans Alexis Monteil, Histoire des Francois des divers etats ... (extracts from this
work were given in the article “Die franzosische Bettler-Monarchie des siebzehnten
Jahrhunderts” published in the W estphalische Dampfboot). — Ed.

b The reference is to the article “Humanismus-Kommunismus” marked by a
multiplication sign (X). — Ed.

The True Socialists

549

massive Nemesis.149 For a fairly long time a certain Herr Fr. Schnake
in the role of Perseus has held up before the public the Gorgon
shield of the Gesellschaftsspiegel, and indeed so successfully that not
only the public has gone to sleep over the Gesellschaftsspiegel, but the
latter has gone to sleep over the public. Our Perseus, however, is a
joker. After attaining this enviable result, he notifies (last issue, last
page): 1) that the Gesellschaftsspiegel has passed away3; 2) that, to
avoid delay, it is best in future to order it through the post.
Whereupon, after correcting its last misprints, it makes its exit.

One can see already from this regard for the “real conditions” that
here too we have to do with the mode compose of true socialism. There
is, however, an important difference between the Ram and Bull and
our Perseus. One must record that the Ram and Bull remain as
faithful as possible to the “real conditions”, namely, those of
Westphalia and Germany in general. Proof of it is the above-given
lamentable display of the Ram. Proof of it is the Bull’s good-natured
descriptions from German political life, which we have had to omit.
In going over to their new standpoint, what they have especially
taken with them from the mode simple is simple, unvarnished
philistinism, German reality; the vindication of man, and of German
theory, etc., is left to all kinds of multiplication signs and other
subordinate stars. With the Gesellschaftsspiegel it is just the opposite.
Here the army leader Perseus divests himself as much as possible of
petty-bourgeois reality, the exploitation of which he leaves to his
retinue and, true to the myth, raises himself high into the air of
German theory. He is the more able to show a certain disdain for
“real conditions” because he has a much more definite standpoint. If
the directly Westphalian stars represent the mode compose, then
Perseus is tout ce qu’il y a de plus compose en Allemagne.b In his most
daring ideological flights he nevertheless takes his stand always on
the “material basis” and this secure foundation gives him an audacity
in the struggle which Messrs. Gutzkow, Steinmann, Opitz and other
important characters will remember for years to come. The
“material basis” of our Perseus, however, consists mainly in the
following:

1 . “It is only with the abolition of the material basis of our society, private gain, that
man will become different” (No. X, p. 53).c

a In the German original a play on the word schlafen (sleep), einschlafen (fall
asleep), entschlafen (expire, die, pass away). — Ed.
b All that is most complex in Germany. — Ed.

c Here and below are quotations from Friedrich Schnake’s note about Gutzkow’s
article on communism. — Ed.

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Frederick Engels

If the mode simple, which so often uttered this ancient thought, had
known only that private gain was the material basis of our society, it
would have been the mode compose, and under the auspices of our
Perseus it could have continued to lead a tranquil and humble
existence in all godliness and honour. But thus it had itself no
material basis, and it came to pass as was written by the prophet
Goethe:

The noble who has no bottom —

What will he sit upon?3

How “material” this basis, private gain, is can be seen, inter alia,
from the following passages:

“Egoism, private gain” (which are, therefore, identical, and hence “egoism” is also
a “ material basis"), “disorganises the world by the principle: Each for himself,” etc.
(p. 53).

Hence it is a “ material basis” which “disorganises”, not by means
of “material” facts, but ideal “principles”. Poverty, as is known (for
anyone to whom it is not yet known, Perseus himself expounds it in
the above-mentioned place), is also an aspect of “our society”. We
learn, however, that not the “material basis, private gain”, but au
contraire

“the transcendental has plunged mankind into poverty” (p. 54 — all three quotations are
from a single article).

May “the transcendental” most speedily free the unlucky Perseus
“from the poverty in which” the “material basis” has “plunged”
him!

2. “The real mass is set into motion, not by an idea, but by ‘well-understood
interest’.... In the social revolution ... the egoism of the conservative party will be
confronted by the nobler egoism of the people in need of salvation”!! (a people “in
need of salvation” making a revolution!) ... “the people fights indeed for its
‘well-understood interest’ against the exclusive, brutal interest of private persons,
being supported and sustained by a moral force and restless zeal” (No. XII, p. 86).

The “well-understood interest” of our Perseus “in need of
salvation”, who is undoubtedly “supported and sustained by a moral
force and restless zeal”, consists in “confronting” the “egoism of the
conservative party” with the “nobler egoism” of silence, for he does
not “set even a single idea into motion” without at the same time
compromising the mode compose of true socialism.

3 The last lines from Goethe’s epigram “Totalitat”. — Ed.

Here and below Engels quotes from the following articles by Friedrich Schnake:
“Ein neuer kritischer Evangelist” and “Herr Fr. Steinmann fiber den Pauperismus
und Communismus”. Both articles were published in No. XII of the Gesellschafts-
spiegel. — Ed.

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551

3. “Poverty is a consequence of property, which is private property and exclusive
in its nature!!” (XII, 79).

4. “ Which associations are meant here, cannot be determined; if, however, the author
means the egoistic associations of capitalists, then he has forgotten the important
associations of manual workers against the arbitrary power of the employers”!! (XII,
80).

Perseus is more fortunate. What kind of nonsense he wanted to
compose “cannot be determined”, but if he “meant” the merely
stylistic kind, theq he has by no means “forgotten” the equally
“important” logical nonsense. In connection with the associations,
we mention further that on page 84 we are given information about
“associations in the proper sense, which raise the consciousness of the
proletarian and develop energetic” (!) “proletarian” (!) “total” (!!!)
“opposition to the existing conditions”.

We have alreadv spoken above,150 in connection with Herr Griin,
about the habit of the true socialists of assimilating theories which
they have not understood by means of learning by heart isolated
phrases and slogans." The mode compose differs from the mode simple
only by the quantity of such indigested mouthfuls, procured by
devious means and therefore the more hastily swallowed, and by the
terrible stomach-ache caused it thereby. We have seen how “real
relations”, “questions of political economy”, etc., crop up among
the Westphalians at every word, and how the intrepid Perseus
labours on the “material basis”, the “well-understood interest” and
the “proletarian opposition”. In addition, this latter knight of the
mirrorb makes any use he pleases of the “feudalism of money”,
which he would have done better to leave to its originator, Fourier.
He has so little understood the meaning of this catchword that in No.
XII, page 79, he asserts that “in lieu of the feudal aristocracy a
propertied aristocracy is created” by this feudalism; according to this
1) the “feudalism of money”, i.e., the “propertied aristocracy”,
“creates” itself and 2) the “feudal aristocracy” has not been a
“propertied aristocracy”. Next he voices the opinion, page 79, that
the “feudalism of money ” (i.e., of the bankers, which has the smaller
capitalists and industrialists as vassals, if one wants to keep to the
metaphor) and that “of industry” (which has the proletarians as
vassals) are “only one”

Freely linked to the “material basis” is also the following pious
wish of the knight of the mirror, a wish which reminds one of the
joyful hope of the Westphalians that for their, the Teutoburgians’,

a Frederick Engels, German Socialism in Verse and Prose, Essay 2 (see present
edition, Vol. 6). — Ed.

h A reference to the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel (Mirror of Society). — Ed.

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Frederick Engels

edification the French Chamber of Deputies would read a course of
lectures on political economy:

“But we have to point out that in the issues of the (New York) Volks-Tribun sent us
we have so far learned almost nothing at all ... about the trade and industry of
America.... Lack of instructive information on the industrial and economic conditions
of America, from which, after air (indeed?), “social reform always proceeds”, etc.
(X, p. 56).a

The Volks-Tribun, a newspaper that seeks to carry on popular
propaganda in America, is therefore blamed, not because it sets
about its job wrongly, but because it omits to give the
Gesellschaftsspiegel “instructive information” on things with which, in
the manner demanded here at any rate, it has nothing whatever to
do. Ever since Perseus caught hold of the “material basis”, which he
does not know what to make of, he demands that everyone should
give him information about it.

In addition, Perseus also tells us that competition is ruining the
small middle class, and that

“because of the heavy cloth luxury in the style of dress ... is very burdensome”
(XII, p. 83 — Perseus probably believes that a satin dress weighs as much as a suit of
armour), and more of the like.

And in order that the reader may be in no doubt about the
“material basis” of the ideas of our Perseus, it is said in No. X,
page 53:

“Herr Gutzkow would do well to acquaint himself first of all with the German
science of society so that recollections of the despised French communism, Babeuf,
Cabet ... do not get in his way”,

and page 52:

“ German communism wants to bring about a society in which labour and enjoyment
are identical and no longer separated from each other by an external remuneration .”

We have seen above what both the “German science of society”
and the society which is to be “brought about” consist of, and we
have not found ourselves in exactly the best society.

As far as the comrades of the knight of the mirror are concerned,
they “bring about” an extremely boring “society”. For a while they
intended to play the part of providence for the German townsman
and villager. Without the knowledge and will of the Gesell-
schaftsspiegel no tiler fell off a roof or a small child into the
water. Luckily for the Dorfzeitung ,151 for which this competition
began to be dangerous, the mirror fraternity soon gave up this
wearisome activity: one after another they went to sleep from sheer
exhaustion. In vain were all methods tried to rouse them, to inject

a A note by Friedrich Schnake about the newspaper Volks-Tribun. — Ed.

The True Socialists

553

new life-blood into the journal; the petrifying influence of the
Gorgon shield affected also the contributors: at the end our Perseus
stood there alone with his shield and his “material basis” — “the only
sensitive breast among the corpses”,3 the impossible waist-line of the
massive Nemesis collapsed in ruins, and the Gesellschaftsspiegelce ased
to exist.

Peace to its ashes! Meanwhile let us wheel round and look for
another bright constellation in a neighbouring region of the
Northern hemisphere. Shining towards us with gleaming tail is Ursa
Major, the Great Bear, or ursine Major Piittmann, also called the
seven-star constellation, because he always appears with six others in
order to achieve the required twenty printed sheets.152 A valiant
warrior! Bored with his four-footed position on the celestial map, he
has at last stood up on his hind legs, he has armed himself as it is
written: don then the uniform of character and the sash of
conviction; fasten on your shoulders the epaulettes of bombast and
put on the three-cornered hat of enthusiasm, and adorn your manly
breast with the cross of the order of self-sacrifice, third class; gird
yourself with the venomous spear of hatred of despotism and have
your feet shod to carry on propaganda15 with the smallest possible
costs of production. Thus equipped our Major steps in front of his
battalion, draws his sword and gives the command: Attention! — and
delivers the following speech:

Soldiers! From the height of yonder publishing-house window
forty louis d’or look down upon you.c Look around you, heroic
defenders of “total reform of society”, do you see the sun? There
rises the sun of Austerlitz,d which presages our victory, soldiers!

“The consciousness of fighting only for the poor and rejected, for the betrayed and the
desperate, gives us the courage, the fearlessness, to hold out right to the end. We do not
defend half -measures, we do not want something vague" (but rather something totally
confused); “hence we are resolute and, despite everything, remain forever true to the
people, to the oppressed peoplel" ( Rheinische Jahrbucher, Vol. II, Preface).

Shoulder arms! — Attention! — Present arms! — Long live the new
social order, which we have amended according to Babeuf in 14
chapters and 63 clauses of field regulations!

“Ultimately, of course, it does not matter whether things will be as we have stated,
but they will be different from what the enemy imagines, different from what they

a A paraphrase of a line froiu Schiller’s poem “Der Taucher”. — Ed.
b Cf. Ephesians 6:11, 14, 15.— • Ed.

An ironical paraphrase of a passage from Napoleon-Bonaparte’s speech to the
army on July 21, 1798 before the Battle of the Pyramids: “Soldiers, from the summit
of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you!” — Ed.

Napoleon I’s words before the Battle of Austerlitz. — Ed.

554

Frederick Engels

have been hitherto! All despicable institutions, which have been produced by dirty
work in the course of centuries for the ruin of the nations and people, will perish!”

( Rheinische Jahrbiicher, II, p. 240). a

Damn it all! Attention! — Slope arms! Left turn! Order arms! Stand
at ease! Forward march! — But the bear is by nature a true German
animal. After evoking by this speech a general rousing hurrah, and
so accomplishing one of the most valorous deeds of our century, he
sits down at home and gives free rein to his soft, loving heart in a
long, touching elegy on “hypocrisy” b ( Rheinische Jahrbiicher, II,
pp. 129-49). In our time, which is internally decayed and corroded
body and soul by the worm of self-seeking, there are — unfortunate-
ly!— individuals who have no warm, beating heart in their breasts,
whose eyes have never been filled with a sympathetic tear, through
whose empty skulls no blinding flash of enthusiasm for mankind has
ever passed. Reader, if you find such a one let him read the elegy on
“hypocrisy” by the Great Bear, and he will weep, weep, weep! Here
he will see how poor, wretched and naked he is, for whether he be
theologian, lawyer, physician, statesman, merchant, broom-maker or
box-keeper, here he will find exposed the particular hypocrisy
characteristic of each social group. He will see here how hypocrisy
has ensconced itself everywhere and especially “what a grievous
curse that of the lawyers” is. If this does not make him repent and
mend his ways, he is not worthy to have been born in the century of
the Great Bear. In fact, one must be an honest, and as the English say
“unsophisticated”, bear in order to scent out the hypocrisy of the
wicked world everywhere. The Great Bear encounters hypocrisy
wherever he turns. It happens to him as to his predecessor in “Lilis
Park’Y

Ha! At the corner when I stay,

And from afar I hear their chatter,

And see the flitter and the flutter,

I turn around

With a growling sound

And then run off a little way,

And then look round
With a growling sound,

And then run back a little way.

But then I finally turn round.

Of course, for how is it possible to escape from hypocrisy in our
thoroughly rotten society! But it is sad!

a Hermann Piittmann, “Apres le deluge”. — Ed.

Hermann Piittmann, “Heuchelei” (“Hypocrisy”). — Ed.

1 Here and below Engels quotes three passages from Goethe’s poem “Lilis
Park”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

555

“Everyone can be slanderous, self-satisfied, perfidious, malicious and anything else
he chooses, because the appropriate form has been found” (p. 145).

It is really enough to make one desperate, especially if one is
Ursa Major!

And “alas! the family , too, is besmirched by lies ... and the web of lies goes right
through the family and passes hereditarily from one member to another”.

Woe, threefold woe to the heads of families of the German
Fatherland!

Rage suddenly boils up, there blows
A mighty spirit from the nose,

The inner nature goes berserk —

and Ursa Major stands up again on his hind legs:

“A curse on self-seeking! How terribly you hover over people’s heads! With your
black pinions ... with your shrill croaking.... A curse on self-seeking!... Millions and
millions of poor slaves ... weeping and sobbing, complaining and wailing.... A curse on
self-seeking!... A curse on self-seeking!... Gang of priests of Baal.... Breath of
pestilence.... A curse on self-seeking! Monster of self-seeking ...” (pp. 146-48).

And then it is my bristles rise;

Unwont to serve am I.

And every ornamental shrub nearby
Makes fun of me! The bowling green
And the neat, well-mown lawns I flee;

The box-tree cocks a snook at me,

I weary myself with work; if tired enough,

I lay me down by artificial cascades.

Chew, weep, and till half dead roll to and fro.
Alas! I only waste my woe
On heedless porcelain oreads!

The greatest “hypocrisy” of the whole jeremiad consists in making
out that such a miserere compiled from trite literary phrases and
recollections of novels is a description of “hypocrisy” in present-day
society, and in pretending that for the sake of suffering humanity
this bugbear causes ohe to fly into a passion.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the map of the heavens, knows
that Ursa Major is there found in friendly conversation with an
individual of uninteresting appearance who has several greyhounds
on a leash and is called Bootes. This conversation is reproduced in the
firmament of true socialism on pages 241-56 of the Rheinische
Jahrbiicher, Vol. II. The role of Bootes is assumed by that same Herr
Semmig whose essay on “Socialism, Communism and Humanism”

556

Frederick Engels

has already been discussed above.3 * Thus we have come to the Saxon
group, of which he is the most eminent star, for which reason he has
written a little volume on Sachsische Zustande. In the passage which we
quoted earlier Ursa Major utters a well-satisfied growl about this
little volume and recites whole pages from it “with intense delight”.6
These quotations suffice to characterise the booklet as a whole and
are the more welcome since the writings of Bootes are otherwise
unobtainable abroad.

Although in his Sachsische Zustande Bootes has descended from the
height of his speculation to “real conditions”, he still belongs with his
entire Saxon group, as also Ursa Major, heart and soul, to the mode
simple of true socialism. In general, the mode compose is exhausted
with the Westphalians and the mirror fraternity, in particular with
the Ram, the Bull and Perseus. The Saxon and all the other groups,
therefore, offer us only further developments of the simple true
socialism, which we have already described above.

Bootes, as a burgher and portrayer of the model German
constitutional state, in the first place lets loose one of his greyhounds
against the liberals. It is the less necessary for us to examine this
sparkling philippic since, like all similar tirades of the true socialists,
it is nothing more than a shallow Germanisation of the criticism of the
same subject by the French socialists. Bootes is in exactly the same
situation as the capitalists; he possesses, to use his own words, “the
products produced by the workers” of France and their literary
representatives “as a result of the blind inheritance of foreign
capitals” ( Rheinische Jahrbiicher, II, p. 256). He has not even
translated them into German, for this had already been done by
others before him. (Cf. Deutsches Biirgerbuch, Rheinische Jahrbiicher, I,
etc.). He has merely enlarged this “blind inheritance” by some
“blindnesses” which are not simply German, but of the particular
Saxon kind. Thus, he says (ibid., p. 243) that the liberals advocated
“public judicial proceedings in order to declaim their rhetorical
exercises in the court of justice”! Hence Bootes, in spite of his zeal
against the bourgeoisie, capitalists, etc., sees in the liberals not so
much these as their paid servants, the lawyers.

The result of our Bootes’ penetrating investigations of liberalism is
noteworthy. True socialism has never before so clearly expressed its
reactionary political tendency:

“But you... proletarians... who previously allowed yourselves to be set in motion by
these liberal bourgeois and to be misguided into tumults (think of 1830), be careful!

3 See this volume, pp. 458-70. — Ed.

Goethe, Faust, I. Teil, “Nacht”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

557

Do not support them in their efforts and struggles ... let them fight out alone what
they ... begin only in their own interests; above all do not at any time take part in political
revolutions, which always emanate from a dissatisfied minority that, thirsting for
power, would like to overthrow the ruling power and seize the government for itself”
(pp. 245-46).

Bootes has the most legitimate claims to the gratitude of the royal
Saxon Government — a Rautenkrone3 is the least reward it can give
him. If it were feasible that the German proletariat might follow his
advice, the existence of the feudalistic, petty-bourgeois, peasant-
bureaucratic model state of Saxony would be ensured for a long
time. Bootes dreams that what is good for France and England,
where the bourgeoisie rules, must also be good for Saxony, where it is
still far from ruling. Furthermore, how impossible it is for the
proletariat even in England and France to remain indifferent to
questions that are indeed of immediate interest only to the
bourgeoisie or a faction of the bourgeoisie, Bootes can read every
day in the proletarian newspapers there. Such questions are, inter
alia, in England the disestablishment of the Church, the so-called
equitable adjustment15 of the national debt, and direct taxation; in
France the extension of the franchise to the petty bourgeoisie, the
abolition of urban customs duties, etc.

Finally, all Saxon “celebrated freedom of thought is mere wind
and froth ... verbal combat”, not because nothing is achieved by it
and the bourgeoisie does not advance a single step, but because with
its help “you”, the liberals, “are not able to accomplish a
fundamental cure of the sick society” (p. 249). They are the less able
to do so since they do not even regard society as being sick.

Enough of this. On page 248 Bootes lets loose a second economic
greyhound.

In Leipzig ... “whole districts have newly come into being” (Bootes knows of
districts which do not “come into being” “new” but are old from the outset). “As a
result of this, however, a grievous disproportion has developed in regard to premises,
in that there is an absence of dwellings at a” (!) “medium price. For the sake of a high
interest” (! it is supposed to mean a higher rent), “every builder of a new house designs
it in such a way that it is only suitable for big households; owing to the lack of other
kinds of dwellings, many families are forced to rent bigger premises than they need or
can pay for. Thus debts, attachment, protests of bills of exchange and so forth
accumulate!” (This “!” deserves a second (!).) “In short, the lower middle class is in fact to
he ousted.”

One can only admire the primitive simplicity of this economic
greyhound! Bootes sees that the lower middle class of the

3 Wreath of rue — the highest order in Saxony. — Ed.
b These two words are in English in the manuscript. — Ed.

558

Frederick Engels

enlightened town of Leipzig is being ruined in a way that is highly
cheering for us. “In our day, when all distinctions in the human
species are being obliterated” (p. 251), this phenomenon ought to be
equally welcome to him; but on the contrary, it distresses him and
makes him look for the cause of it. He finds this cause in the malice
of the speculative builders, whose aim it is to house every small
artisan and shopkeeper in a palace at an extortionate rent. The
Leipzig “builders of new houses”, as Bootes explains in the most
clumsy and confused Saxon language — it cannot be called Ger-
man— are superior to all laws of competition. They build dearer
dwellings than their customers require, they do not adapt themselves
to the state of the market, but to a “high interest”; and whereas
everywhere else the consequence would be that they would have to
let their dwellings at a lower price, in Leipzig they succeed in
subjecting the market to their own bon plaisir and compelling the
tenants to ruin themselves by high rents! Bootes has taken a gnat for
an elephant, a temporary disproportion between demand and sup-
ply in the housing market for a permanent state of things, indeed
for the cause of the ruin of the petty bourgeoisie. But Saxon social-
ism can be forgiven such simple-mindedness as long as it

“accomplishes a work worthy of Man and for which Men will bless ‘it’” (p. 242).

We know already that true socialism is a great hypochondriac.
However, one might cherish the hope that Bootes, who showed such
a pleasant audacity of judgment in the first volume of the Rheinische
Jahrbiicher, would be free from this disease. By no means. On pages
252, 253 Bootes lets loose the following whining greyhound and
thereby throws Ursa Major into an ecstasy.

“The Dresden shooting-match ... a popular festival, and one can hardly step on to
the meadow before being met with the wailing hurdy-gurdies of the blind, whose
hunger is not satisfied by the constitution ... and being revolted by the ballyhoo of the
‘artists’ who by the contortions of their limbs entertain a society whose structure is
itself monstrously and revoltingly contorted.”

(When a tightrope walker stands on his head, that signifies for
Bootes the present-day topsy-turvy world; the mystic significance of
turning somersaults is bankruptcy; the secret of the egg-dance is the
career of the truly socialist writer who, in spite of all “contortions”,
sometimes takes a false step and besmirches his whole “material
basis” with egg-yolk; a hurdy-gurdy signifies a constitution, which
does not satisfy one’s hunger; a Jew’s harp signifies freedom of the
press, which does not satisfy one’s hunger; and an old clothes barrow
signifies true socialism, which also does not satisfy one’s hunger.

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559

Immersed in this symbolism, Bootes wanders sighing through the
crowd and so arrives, as Perseus did before, at the proud feeling of
being “the only sensitive breast among monsters”a.)

“And there in the tents the brothel-keepers carry on ... their shameless trade”
(there follows a long tirade about)... “prostitution, plague-breathing monster, you are
the last fruit of our present-day society” (not always the last, there may perhaps be
subsequently an illegitimate child).... “I could tell stories of how a girl threw herself at
the feet of a strange man” ... (the story follows).... “I could tell stories, but no, I will
not” (for he has just told the story).... “No, do not accuse them, the poor victims of
want and seduction, but bring them, the insolent procurers, before the judge’s seat ...
no, no, not even them! What do they do except what others do, they carry on their
trade, where all carry on trade”, etc.

Thus the true socialist has thrown off all blame from all individuals
and shifted it on to “society”, which is inviolable. Cost fan tutti,b it is
finally only a matter of remaining good friends with all the world.
The characteristic aspect of prostitution, namely, that it is the most
tangible exploitation — one directly attacking the physical body — of
the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, the aspect where the “deed-
producing heart-ache” (from p. 253) with its moral pauper’s broth
suffers bankruptcy, and where passion, class hatred thirsting for
revenge, begins — this aspect is unknown to true socialism. Instead it
bewails in the prostitutes the ruined grocers’ assistants and small
craftsmen’s wives in whom he can no longer admire “the masterpiece
of creation”, the “blossoms pervaded by the aroma of the holiest and
sweetest feelings”. Pauvre petit bonhomme!

The flower of Saxon socialism is a small weekly sheet entitled
Veilchen. Blatter fur die harm lose moderne Kritikc edited and
published by G. Schlussel in Bautzen. Thus the “violets” are in effect
primroses. d These tender flowers were described as follows in the
Trier'sche Zeitung (January 12 of this year) by a Leipzig correspon-
dent, who is also one of this group:

“In the Veilchen we can welcome an advance, a development in Saxon belles-lettres ;
young as this journal is, it zealously seeks to reconcile the old Saxon political
half-heartedness with the social theory of the present time.”

The “old Saxon half-heartedness” is not half-hearted enough for
these arch-Saxons, they have to halve it once more by “reconciling”
it. Extremely “inoffensive”!

a Friedrich Schiller, “Der Taucher”. — Ed.

All do it — a saying derived from the title of Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutte (All
[Women] Do It).- Ed.

c Violets. Leaves for Inoffensive Modem Criticism. — Ed.

The German word used is Schliisselblumen, i.e., primroses. — Ed.

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Frederick Engels

We have only managed to see one of these violets; but:

Head shyly bowed, and all unknown.

It was a darling violet.3

In this issue — the first of 1847 — friend Bootes lays some pretty
little verses as homage at the feet of “inoffensive modern” ladies. It
is stated there inter alia :

Of hate for Tyranny, the thorn
Graces e’en women’s tender heartsb —

a comparison the audacity of which in the meantime will surely have
“graced” our Bootes’ “tender heart” with a “thorn” that pricks his
conscience.

“They glow not just with amorous arts ” —

should Bootes, who indeed “ could tell stories”, but “wiir not tell
them, because he has already told them, and who speaks of no other
“thorn” than that of “hate for Tyranny”, should this decent and
cultured man be really capable of making the “fair cheeks” of
women and maidens “glow” by means of ambiguous “amorous arts”?

They glow not just with amorous arts.

They glow with freedom-loving fury.

With holy rage, those cheeks so fair
That charm like roses everywhere.

The glow of “freedom-loving fury” must, of course, be easily
distinguishable by a chaster, more moral and “brighter” colour from
the dark-red glow of “amorous arts”, especially for a man like
Bootes, who can distinguish the “thorn of hate for Tyranny” from
all other “thorns”.

The Veilchen gives us an immediate opportunity of becoming
acquainted with one of those beauties whose “tender heart is graced
by the thorn of hate for Tyranny” and whose “fair cheeks glow with
freedom-loving fury”. Namely the Andromeda of the truly socialist
firmament (Fraulein Luise Otto), the modern woman fettered to the
rock of unnatural conditions and washed by the foam of ancient
prejudices, provides an “inoffensive modern criticism” of the
poetical works of Alfred Meissner .c It is a strange, but charming
spectacle to observe how overflowing enthusiasm here struggles
against the tender modesty of the German maiden, enthusiasm for
the “king of poets”, who causes the deepest strings of the female

3 From Goethe’s poem “Das Veilchen”. — Ed.

Here and below Engels quotes from Friedrich Hermann Semmig’s poem
“Einer Frau ins Stammbuch”. — Ed.

c Luise Otto, “Alfred Meissners neueste Poesien”. — Ed.

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heart to vibrate and draws from them tones of homage that border
on deeper and tenderer sensations, tones which in their innocent
frankness are the finest reward of the singer. Let us hear in all their
naive originality these flattering admissions of a maiden’s soul, for
whom so much remains obscure in this wicked world. Let us hear
and remember that to the pure all things are pure.

Indeed, “the deep soulfulness which pervades Meissner’s poems can only be felt,
but cannot be explained to those who are incapable of feeling it. These songs are the
golden reflection of the fierce flames which blaze in the heart of the poet as a sacrifice
on the altar of freedom, a reflection whose brilliance reminds us of Schiller’s words:
subsequent generations may overlook the author who was not more than his
works — we feel here that this poet himself is something more than his beautiful songs”
(for sure, Fraulein Andromeda, for sure), “that there is in him something inexpressible,
something ‘which passeth show', as Hamlet savs”.a (O you foreboding angel, you!b)
“This something is what is lacking in so many modern poets of freedom, e.g., entirely
so in Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Prutz” (is this really the case?), “and in part also
in Herwegh and Freiligrath; this something is perhaps genius.”

Perhaps it is Bootes’ “ thorn ”, beautiful Fraulein!

“Nevertheless,” the same article states, “criticism has its duty — but criticism
appears to me to be very wooden in relation to such a poet!”

How maidenly! Certainly, a young, pure, girlish soul must
“appear” to itself to be “very wooden” in relation to a poet who
possesses such a wonderful “something”.

“We go on reading right to the last stanza, which ought to remain faithfully in the
memory of all of us:

‘“And yet at last will come
The dav ...

Peoples shall sit together, hand in hand,

Like children in the great hall of the heavens.

Once more a chalice, a chalice shall pass round,

Love's chalice at the iove-feast of the nations.’”

Then Fraulein Andromeda sinks into an eloquent silence “like a
child, hand in hand”. Let us take care not to disturb her.

Our readers will be eager after this to become more closely
acquainted with the “king of poets”, Alfred Meissner, and his
“something” . He is the Orion of the truly socialist firmament, and in
truth he is no disgrace to his post. Girded with the shining sword of
poesy, wrapt “in his cloak of grief” (p. 67 and p. 260 of A. Meissner’s
Gedichte, second edition, Leipzig, 1846), he swings in his sinewy fist
the club of unintelligibility, with which he victoriously strikes down
all opponents of the good cause. At his heels, there follows a certain

£ Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2. — Ed.

Goethe, Faust, I. Teil, “Marthens Garten”. — Ed.

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Moritz Hartmann, in the shape of a small dog,3 who for the sake of the
good cause raises an energetic yapping under the title Kelch und
Schwert (Leipzig, 1845). To speak in earthly terms, with these heroes
we have entered a region which for a fairly long time already has
provided numerous sturdy recruits for true socialism, viz., the
Bohemian forests.

As is well known, the first true socialist in the Bohemian forests
was Karl Moor. He did not succeed in carrying through the work of
regeneration to the end; he was not understood by his contem-
poraries, and he handed himself over to justice. Now Orion-
Meissner has undertaken to tread in the footsteps of this noble figure
and — at least in its spirit — to bring his lofty work nearer to the goal.
He, Karl Moor the Second, has at his side as his assistant the
above-mentioned Moritz Hartmann, Canis Minor — in the role of the
worthy Schweizev— who celebrates God, King and Fatherland in
elegiac manner and, in particular, sheds tears of thankful remem-
brance at the grave of that simple man, Kaiser Joseph. Concerning
the rest of the group, we shall merely remark that none of them as
yet appear to have developed enough understanding and wit to
undertake the role of Spiegelberg.

It is obvious at first glance that Karl Moor the Second is no
ordinary man. He learned German in Karl Beck’s school and
therefore his mode of speech is of more than oriental magnificence.
For him belief is a “butterfly” (p. 13), the heart is a “flower” (p. 16),
later on a “desolate forest” (p. 24), and finally a “vulture” (p. 31).
For him the evening sky is (p. 65)

red and staring, like an empty socket
where once an eye was, without lustre or soul.

The smile of his beloved is “a child of Earth caressing the children
of God” (p. 19).

But it is his tremendous world-weariness, still more than his showy
picturesque language, which distinguishes him from ordinary
mortals. In this way he shows that he is a true son and successor of
Karl Moor the First; thus on page 65 he proves that “wild
world-weariness” is one of the first requirements of every “saviour
of the world”. In fact, as far as world-weariness is concerned,
Orion-Moor outdoes all his predecessors and competitors. Let us
hear what he says himself.

“ Crucified by anguish, I was dead” (p. 7). “This heart dedicated to death ” (p. 8). “My
mind is dark” (p. 10). For him, “ancient suffering laments in the desolate forest of the

a Canis Minor (the Lesser Dog) — a constellation to the East of Orion. — Ed.

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heart” (p. 24). “It would be better ne’er to have been born, but death, too, would be
good” (p. 29).

In this most bitter, evil hour.

When by the cold world you’re rejected,

Admit, my heart, through bloodless lips
That you’re ineffably dejected (p. 30).

On page 100 he “bleeds from many a hidden wound”, and on
page 101 concern for mankind causes him to feel so unwell that he
has to press his arms “firmly like pincers ... round his breast, which
threatens to burst asunder”, and on page 79 he is a crane that has
been shot and cannot fly to the south in autumn with its fellows;
“with lead-pierced pinions” it flounders in the bushes and “flaps its
broad, blood-stained wings” [p. 78]. Whence comes all this
suffering? Are all these laments merely everyday love moaning a la
Werther increased by dissatisfaction because of the personal
suffering of our poet? Not at all. Our poet has indeed suffered a
great deal, but he has been able to derive a general aspect from all his
suffering. He often indicates, e.g., on page 64, that women have
played him many mean tricks (the usual fate of Germans, especially
poets), that he has had bitter experiences in his life; but all this
merely proves for him the badness of the world and the need for an
alteration of social conditions. It is not Alfred Meissner, but
mankind, that has suffered in his person and therefore from all his
woes he only concludes that it is a great feat and a heavy burden of
suffering to be a man.

O heart, learn here (in the wilderness), however

you may fare,

The burden of being man bravely to bear (p. 66).

O pain so sweet, O blessed curse,

0 sweet distress of being a man (p. 90).

In our unfeeling world such noble pain can count only on
indifference, insulting rebuff and ridicule. Such is the experience of
Karl Moor the Second as well. We have already seen above that “the
cold world forgets” him. In this respect he really fares very ill:

That I might flee from man’s cold ridicule,

1 built myself a prison, cold as the grave (p. 227).

On one occasion he again takes courage:

Pale hypocrite, that reviles me without rest,

Tell me the pain that has not pierced my heart,

The lofty passion that has not fired my breast (p. 212).

But it is too much for him after all; he retires and, on page 65, goes
“into the wilderness” and, on page 70, “into the mountain desert”.

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Just like Karl Moor the First. Here he has it explained to him by a
stream — because everything suffers, e.g., the lamb torn to pieces by
the eagle suffers, the falcon suffers, the reed that rustles in the wind
suffers — “how small then human woes” are, and how indeed
nothing is left for him but “to rejoice and perish”. Since, however,
“rejoicing” does not really seem to come from his heart, and
“perishing” does not seem to suit him at all, he rides forth in order to
hear the “voices on the heath”. Here he fares even worse. Three
mysterious horsemen ride up to him one after the other and in
rather dry words give him the good advice that he should get himself
buried:

Indeed, you would do better...

To burrow through dead leaves and die
Covered by grasses and the humid earth (p. 75).

This is the crown of his sufferings. Human beings spurn him and
his moaning; he turns to nature and here too he meets only with
disagreeable faces and rude replies. And after Karl Moor the
Second’s aching pain has thus flapped “its broad, blood-stained
wings” in front of our eyes until we are disgusted, we find on
page 211a sonnet in which the poet believes he must defend himself:

... for dumb, concealing from the world my woe,

I nurse my wounds and bear my scorching pain,

Because my mouth scorns idly to complain.

Of terrible experience makes no showW

But the “saviour of the world” must be not only afflicted by pain
but also wild. Hence “a storm of passion rages wild within his breast”
(p. 24); when he loves, “fiercely blaze his suns” (p. 17); his “loving is
a flash of lightning, his poetry a storm” (p. 68). We shall soon have
examples showing how wild his wildness is.

Let us rapidly glance through some of the socialist poems of
Orion-Moor.

From page 100 to page 106 he flaps his “broad, blood-stained
wings” in order during his flight to survey the evils of present-day
society. In a frantic fit of “wild world-weariness” he runs through
the streets of Leipzig. Night is around him and in his heart. Finally,
he comes to a stop. A mysterious demon comes up to him and in the
tone of a night-watchman asks him what he is doing in the street so
late. Karl Moor the Second, who was just then occupied in firmly
pressing the “pincers” of his arms against his chest that was
“threatening to burst”, Karl Moor with eyes like fiercely blazing
suns looks the demon straight in the face and finally breaks into
speech (p. 102):

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565

Awakened from faith’s starry night,

This much I see in spirit’s light:

He of Golgotha has not yet brought
Salvation that this world has sought!

“This much” Karl Moor the Second sees! By the desolate forest
of his heart, by his cloak of grief, by the heavy yoke of being a
man, by the lead-pierced pinions of our poet, and by everything else
that Karl Moor the Second holds holy — it was not worth the trouble
of running through the streets at night, of exposing his breast to the
danger of bursting and of pneumonia, and of conjuring up a special
demon, in order finally to impart this discovery to us! But let us hear
some more. The demon is not yet pacified. Karl Moor the Second
then relates how a young prostitute seized hold of his hand, thereby
evoking in him all kinds of painful reflections, which at last voice
themselves in the following apostrophe:

Woman, for your misery, the blame
Is society’s, which has no mercy!

Pallid victim, sorry sight to see,

On sin’s heathen (!!) altar sacrificed,

So that other women’s purity

In the home stay undefiled and chaste! [P. 103.]

The demon, who now turns out to be a quite ordinary bourgeois,
does not enter into a discussion of the truly socialist theory of
prostitution comprehended in these lines, and instead answers quite
simply that everyone forges his own happiness, “man’s to blame for
his own guilt”, and such like bourgeois phrases. He remarks:
“society is an empty word” (he has probably read Stirner), and he
requests Karl Moor the Second to go on with his account. The latter
tells how he had looked at proletarian dwellings and heard the
weeping of the children:

Just because the mother’s dried-up breast
Not a drop of sweet refreshment yields,

Guiltless babes die in their mother’s care!

Yet (!!) it is a marvel of delight

That from red blood mother’s breast should bear

And give forth a milk of purest white [p. 104].

Whoever has seen this miracle, he declares, has no need to be sad if
he cannot believe that Christ turned water into wine.a The story of
the marriage of Cana seems to have greatly influenced our poet in
favour of Christianity. The world-weariness here becomes so
profound that Karl Moor the Second loses all coherence. The

John 2:1-10. — Ed.

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Frederick Engels

demoniacal bourgeois tries to calm him and makes him continue his
report:

Other children, pale-faced brood, I saw
Where the tall and smoking chimneys climb,

Where the brass wheels in the fiery glow

Stamp their dances out in ponderous time [p. 105].

What sort of factory could it have been, where Karl Moor the
Second saw “wheels in the fiery glow” and, what is more, saw them
“stamping out their dances ”! It could only have been the same factory
where our poet’s verses, which likewise “stamp their dances out in
ponderous time”, are manufactured. There follow some details
about the lot of the factory children. That touches the purse of the
demoniacal bourgeois, who undoubtedly is also a factory-owner. He
becomes excited too, and retorts that it is stuff and nonsense, that the
ragged pack of proletarian children are of no importance, that a
genius had never yet perished on account of such trivialities, that in
general it was not individuals that were important but only mankind
as a whole, which will get along even without Alfred Meissner. Want
and misery are the lot of human beings and in any case,

What the Creator has himself done badly,

Man will never afterwards improve [p. 107].

Thereupon he vanishes and our distressed poet is left standing
alone. The poet shakes his confused head and cannot think of
anything better to do than to go home and put it all down on paper,
word for word, and publish it.

On page 109 “a poor man” wants to drown himself; Karl Moor the
Second nobly holds him back and asks him about his reasons. The
poor man relates that he has travelled a great deal:

Where England’s chimneys blood-red (!) flamed,

In pain that was both dull and dumb,

I saw new hells, I saw new damned.

The poor man saw strange things in England, where in every
factory town the Chartists have shown more activity than all the
German political, socialist and religious parties taken together. He
himself must indeed have been “dull and dumb”.

Sailing to France across the sea,

I saw with horror, terrified,

The working masses seethe round me,

Like lava in a bubbling tide.

He saw all that “with horror, terrified”, the “poor man”! Thus he
saw everywhere the “struggle between the poor and rich”, he
himself being “one of the helots”, and since the rich refuse to listen

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567

and “the people’s day is still far off”, he can think of nothing better
to do than to throw himself into the water — and Meissner, convinced
by his words, lets him go: “Good-bye, I can no longer hold you
back!”

Our poet did very well to allow this narrow-minded coward to
drown himself quietly, a man who saw nothing at all in England,
whom the proletarian movement in France filled only with “horror
and terror”, and who was too lache a to join the struggle of his
class against its oppressors. In any case, the fellow was no good for
anything else.

On page 237 Orion-Moor addresses a Tyrtaian hymn “to women”.
“Now, when men sin in cowardly fashion”, Germany’s blond
daughters are called upon to rise and “proclaim a word of freedom”.
Our tender blondes did not wait for his invitation; the public has
seen “with horror, terrified” examples of the lofty deeds Ger-
many’s women are capable of as soon as they are able to wear
breeches and smoke cigars.

After this criticism of existing society by our poet; let us see what
his pia desideria0 are with regard to the social aspects. At the end we
find a “Reconciliation”, written in a chopped-up prose, which more
than imitates the “Resurrection” at the end of the collected poems of
K. Beck. It states, inter alia :

“Mankind does not live and struggle in order to give birth to the individual.
Mankind is one human being.” According to which, our poet — “the individual” of
course — is “not a human being”. “And it will come, the time ... then mankind will rise
up, a Messiah, a God in its unfolding....” But this Messiah will only come after “many
thousands of years, the new saviour, who will speak” (acting he will leave to others)
“of the division of labour, which is to be fraternal and equal for all children of the
Earth" ... and then “the ploughshare, symbol of the spirit-shadowed earth ... a sign of
profound respect..., will rise up, radiant, crowned with roses, and more beautiful even
than the old Christian cross”.

What will happen after “many thousands of years” is basically of
little concern to us. Hence we do not need to investigate whether the
people who will then exist will be advanced a single inch by the
“speech” of the new saviour, whether they will still want to listen to a
“saviour” at all, and whether the fraternal theory of this “saviour” is
capable of realisation or is safe from the terrors of bankruptcy. This
time our poet does not “see” “this much”. The only thing of interest
in the whole passage is his reverent bowing of the knee before the
holy of holies of the future, the idyllic “ploughshare”. In the ranks
of the true socialists we have so far found only the townsman; here we

d Cowardly. — Ed.
Pious wishes. — Ed.

20—2086

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Frederick Engels

notice already that Karl Moor the Second will show us also the
villager in his Sunday attire. In fact, on page 154, we see him
looking down from the mountain into a lovely Sunday-like valley
where the peasants and shepherds with quiet joyfulness, blithely and
with faith in God, carry on their daily work; and:

The cry was loud within my doubting hear
Oh, hear how blithely poverty can sing!

Here need is “no woman selling her bare flesh, it is a child, its
nakedness is pure!”

I understood that man, so sorely tried.

Will only pious, blithe and good become.

When through hard work at Earth’s maternal breast
He finds his place in bless’d oblivion.

And in order to pronounce still more clearly his serious opinion,
he describes (on page 159) the domestic happiness of a country
blacksmith and expresses the wish that his children

... will never that contagion know
On which in prideful exultation
Wicked men and fools bestow
The name of Culture, Civilisation.

True socialism could not rest until the rural idyll had been
rehabilitated alongside the urban idyll, and Gessner’s shepherd
scenes alongside Lafontaine’s novels. In the shape of Herr Alfred
Meissner, true socialism has adopted the position of Rochow’s
Kinderfreund and from this lofty standpoint has proclaimed that it is
man’s fate to become countrified. Who would have expected such
simple-mindedness from the poet of “wild world-weariness”, from
the owner of “blazing suns”, from Karl Moor the Younger with his
“thunder bolts”?

In spite of his peasant-like longing for the peace of rural life, he
declares that the big cities are his proper field of activity. Accord-
ingly, our poet betook himself to Paris in order there, too, to see

... with horror, terrified,

The working masses seethe round him
Like lava in a bubbling tide [p. 111].

Helas! il n’en fut rien.a In a message from Paris published in the
Grenzbotenb he declares that he is terribly disillusioned. The worthy
poet looked everywhere for this seething mass of proletarians, even

a Alas! nothing came of it. — Ed.
b Alfred Meissner, “Aus Paris”. — Ed.

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569

in the Cirque olympique, where at that time the French Revolution
was enacted to the sound of drums and cannon; but instead of the
dark heroes of virtue and savage republicans that he sought, he
found only a laughing, volatile people of imperturbable cheerfulness
who were much more interested in pretty girls than in the great
problems of mankind. In just the same way he looked for “the
representatives of the French people” in the Chamber of Deputies
and found only a crowd of well-fed, incoherently chattering ventrus*

It is indeed irresponsible of the Paris proletarians not to have
organised a little July revolution in honour of Karl Moor the
Younger, so as to give him the opportunity of obtaining, “with hor-
ror, terrified”, a better opinion of them. Our worthy poet utters a
mighty cry of woe over all these misfortunes and, like a new Jonah
spewed out of the belly of true socialism, he predicts the downfall of
Nineveh -on-the-Seine,b as can be read in detail in the Grenzboten of
1847, No. [14], report “From Paris”, where our poet likewise relates
in a very amusing manner how he mistook a bon bourgeois du Maraisc
for a proletarian and what peculiar misunderstandings arose out
of it.

We shall not bother about his Ziska, for it is merely boring.

Since we have just been talking of poems, we should like to say a
few words about the six instigations to revolution which our
Freiligrath issued under the title Qa ira, Herisau, 1846. The first of
them is a Geman Marseillaise and sings of a “bold pirate”, which “in
Austria, just as in Prussia, is called revolution”. The following
request is addressed to this ship, which flies its own flag and
represents an important reinforcement to the famous German fleet
in partibus in fide Hum. 153

’Gainst silver fleets of gains ill-gotten
Bravely point the cannon’s maw.

On the ocean’s rotting floor, d

May the fruits of greed go rotten [p. 9].

Incidentally, the whole song is written in such an easy-going mood
that, in spite of the metre, it is best sung to the tune: “Get up, you
sailors, the anchor to weigh.” e

Most characteristic is the poem “Wie man’s macht”/ that is to say:

a Pot-bellies. — Ed.
b Cf. Jonah 2:1-10; 3:1-4.— Ed.

c A respectable citizen from Marais (a district of Paris). — Ed.
d Ferdinand Freiligrath, “Vor der Fahrt (Melodie der Marseillaise)”. — Ed.
e From Wilhelm Gerhard’s poem “Matrose”. — Ed.
f “How It Is Done”. — Ed.

20*

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Frederick Engels

how Freiligrath makes a revolution. Bad times have set in, people are
hungry and go about in rags: “How can they obtain bread and
clothes?” In this situation an “audacious fellow” comes forward who
knows what to do. He leads the whole crowd to the stores of the
militia and distributes the uniforms found there, which are at once
put on. The crowd also takes hold of the rifles “as an experiment”
and considers that “it would be fun” to take them as well. At that
moment it occurs to our “audacious fellow” that this “joke with the
clothes might perhaps even be called rebellion, house-breaking and
robbery”, and so one would have “to be ready to fight for one’s
clothes”. And so helmets, sabres and cartridge belts are also taken
and a beggar’s sack hoisted as a flag. In this way they come into the
streets. Then the “royal troops” make their appearance, the general
gives the order to fire, but the soldiers joyously embrace the
dressed-up militia. And since they have now got under way, they ad-
vance on the capital, also for “fun”, find support there and thus as a
result of a “joke over clothing”: “Tumbling down comes throne and
crown, the kingdom trembles on its base” and “triumphantly the
people raise their long downtrodden heads”. Everything happens
so rapidly and smoothly that during the whole procedure surely
not a single member of the “proletarian battalion” finds that his
pipe has gone out. One must admit that nowhere are revolutions
accomplished more merrily and with greater ease than in the
head of our Freiligrath. In truth it requires all the black-galled
hypochondria of the Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung to detect high
treason in such an innocent, idyllic excursion.

The last group of true socialists to which we turn is the Berlin
group. From this group, too, we shall select only one characteristic
individual, namely, Herr Ernst Lronke, because he has performed a
lasting service to German literature by the discovery of a new genre
of artistic writing. For a considerable time the novelists and writers of
short stories of our Fatherland had been short of material. Never
before had such a dearth of raw material for their industry made
itself felt. It is true that the French factories provided much that was
useful but this supply was the less adequate to meet the demand
because much of it was offered immediately to the consumers in the
shape of translations and thus constituted a dangerous competition
to the writers of novels. It was then that the ingenuity of Herr
Dronke was displayed: in the shape of Ophiuchus ,a the serpent holder
in the truly socialist firmament, he held aloft the writhing giant
serpent of the German police legislation, in order to manufacture

Ophiuchus — the Serpent Holder — a constellation. — Ed.

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571

from it in his Polizei-Geschichten a a series of most interesting short
stories. In point of fact this complicated legislation, which is as
slippery as a serpent, contains extremely rich material for this kind
of writing. A novel lies concealed in every paragraph, a tragedy in
every regulation. Herr Dronke, who as a Berlin writer has himself
waged mighty battles against the police presidium, could speak here
from his own experience. There will be no lack of followers once the
way has been shown; it is a rich field. Prussian Law, inter alia, is an
inexhaustible source of tense conflicts and sensational incidents. In
the legislation on divorce, alimony and the bridal wreath alone — not
to speak of the chapters on unnatural private pleasures — the whole
of the German novel industry can find raw material for centuries.
Moreover, nothing is easier than to work up such a paragraph in
poetic form: the conflict and its solution is ready-made there, one has
only to add some trimmings which can be taken from any of the
novels of Bulwer, Dumas or Sue and adapt them slightly, and the
story is ready. Thus it is to be hoped that the German townsman and
villager, as also the studiosus juris or cameralium,b will gradually
come to possess a series of commentaries on contemporary
legislation that will enable them, with ease and total elimination of
pedantry, to become thoroughly conversant with this sphere.

We see from the example of Herr Dronke that our expectations
are not excessive. From the legislation on naturalisation alone he
has composed two stories. In one of them (“Polizeiliche Ehe-
scheidung”c), a writer (the heroes of German writers are always
writers) of the Electorate of Hesse marries a Prussian woman without
the legally prescribed permission of his municipal council. In
consequence his wife and children lose any claim to be Hessian
subjects and as a result of police intervention the married couple are
separated. The writer gets angry, voices his displeasure with the
existing order of things, is on account of this challenged to a duel by
a lieutenant, is stabbed and dies. The police complications had
involved expenses which ruined him financially. His wife, who
ceased to be a Prussian subject because of her marriage to a
foreigner, now experiences extreme want.

In the second story on civil status, for fourteen long years a poor
devil of a man is transferred from Hamburg to Hanover and from
Hanover to Hamburg, in order to taste the delights of the treadmill
in the one place and of prison in the other, and to be flogged on both

d Police Stories. — Ed.

Student of law or cameralistics. — Ed.
c “Police Divorce”. — Ed.

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Frederick Engels

banks of the Elbe. The writer deals in the same way with the evil that
complaints about the police abusing their power can only be made
to the police. A very moving description is given of how the Berlin
police, by their regulation on expulsion of unemployed domestic
servants, encourage prostitution, and also of other poignant
conflicts.

True socialism has allowed itself to be duped by Herr Dronke in
the most good-natured fashion. It has mistaken the Polizei-
Geschichten, lachrymose descriptions of German philistine misery
written in the tone of Menschenhass und Reue ,a for pictures of the
conflicts in modern society; it has believed that this was socialist
propaganda; it has never for a moment reflected on the fact that
such lamentable scenes are quite impossible in France, England and
America, where anything but socialism prevails, and that conse-
quently Herr Dronke is making not socialist, but liberal propaganda.
In this case true socialism is the more excusable because Herr
Dronke himself has not reflected on all that either.

Herr Dronke has also written stories entitled Aus dem Volke.h Here
again we have a story describing the penury of professional authors
so as to win the compassion of the public. This narrative seems to
have inspired Freiligrath to write the touching poem in which he
begs for sympathy for the writer and exclaims: “He, too, is a
proletarian ! ”c When things reach the stage when the German
proletarians settle their accounts with the bourgeoisie and the other
propertied classes, they will, by means of lamp-posts,154 show the
knights of the pen, the lowest of all venal classes, how far they
are proletarians. The other stories in Dronke’s book have been
botched together with a total lack of imagination and considerable
ignorance of real life, and they serve only to foist Herr Dronke’s
socialist ideas on people in whose mouth they are completely inap-
propriate.

In addition, Herr Dronke has written a book about Berlind which is
abreast of modern science, that is to say, it contains a variegated
medley of Young-Hegelian, Bauer’s, Feuerbach’s, Stirner’s, true
socialist and communist views, such as have come into circulation in
the literature of recent years. The outcome of it all is that, despite
everything, Berlin remains the centre of modern culture and
intelligence, and a world city with two-fifths of a million inhabitants,

a Misanthropy and Repentance, a drama by August Kotzebue. — Ed.

Among the People. — Ed.
c Ferdinand Freiligrath, “Requiescat!” — Ed.
d Ernst Dronke, Berlin. — Ed.

The True Socialists

573

the competition of which Paris and London should take heed of.
There are even grisettes in Berlin, but — God knows — they are what
you might expect.

The Berlin circle of true socialists includes Herr Friedrich Sass,
who has also written a book about the city which is his spiritual
home.3 But so far we have only had occasion to see one of this
author’s poems, printed on page 29 of Piittmann’s Album, a book
which we shall presently discuss in more detail. This poem sings of
“The Future of Old Europe” b in the manner of “Lenore started up
from sleep”c with the most repulsive expressions that our author
could find in the entire German language and with the greatest
possible number of grammatical mistakes. The socialism of Herr Sass
reduces itself to the idea that Europe, the “unchaste woman”, will
shortly perish:

Your wooer is the graveyard worm.

Dost hear amid the marriage storm
The Cossacks and the Tatar horde
That ride across your rotting bed?...

Alongside Asia’s barren tomb
Your sarcophagus will find room —

The giant corpses, old and grey,

Are bursting (Ugh!) and are giving way —

As Memphis and Palmyra burst (!)

The savage eagle builds its nest
O’er your decaying brow,

You strumpet, ancient now!

It is clear that the imagination and language of the poet have
“burst” no less than his conception of history.

With this glance into the future we shall conclude our review of the
various constellations of true socialism. It is indeed a brilliant series
of constellations that have passed in front of our telescope, it is the
brightest half of the sky that has been occupied by true socialism with
its army! As the Milky Way enveloping all these lustrous stars with its
tender gleam of bourgeois philanthropy, there is the Trier’ sche
Zeitung, a newspaper that has identified itself body and soul with true
socialism. No event that even most remotely affects true socialism can
take place without the Trier’ sche Zeitung enthusiastically entering the
lists. From Lieutenant Anneke to Countess Hatzfeld, from the
Bielefeld Museum to Madame Aston, the Trier’sche Zeitung has
fought in behalf of true socialism with an energy that has caused its

a Friedrich Sass, Berlin in seiner neuesten Zeil und Entwicklung. — Ed.
b “Des alten Europa’s Zukunft”, a poem by Friedrich Sass. — Ed.
c The first line of Gottfried August Burger’s poem “Lenore”. — Ed.

574

Frederick Engels

brow to be bathed in a noble perspiration. It is in the most literal
sense a Milky Way of tenderness, mercy and love of mankind, and it
is only in very rare cases that it offers sour milk. Tranquilly and
undisturbed, as befits a proper milky way, may it continue in its
course, providing Germany’s valiant citizens with the butter of
soft-heartedness and the cheese of philistinism! It need not be
afraid that anyone will skim off the cream, for it is too watery to
have any.

In order, however, that we may take our leave of true socialism
with unruffled cheerfulness, it has prepared for us a final feast in the
form of the Album published by H. Piittmann, Borna, near Reiche,
1847. Under the aegis of the Great Bear, a girandole is produced
here as brilliant as any to be seen at the Easter festival in Rome. All
the socialist poets have, either voluntarily or under compulsion,
contributed rockets which rise into the sky in hissing, glittering
sheaves, and explode in the air with a loud report into a million stars,
magically turning the night of the conditions around us into the light
of day. But, alas, the beautiful spectacle lasts only a second — the
firework burns out and leaves behind only a thick smoke which
makes the night appear even darker than it really is, a smoke
through which there shine only the seven poems of Heine as constant
bright stars, which to our great astonishment and to the considerable
embarrassment of the Great Bear have appeared in this society. Let
us, however, not be disturbed by this, nor object because several of
Weertti s things that are reprinted here are bound to feel uncomforta-
ble in such company, but let us enjoy the full impression of the
fireworks.155

We find very interesting themes treated here. Three or four times
spring is praised with all the display of which true socialism is
capable. No less than eight seduced girls are presented to us from all
possible points of view. We are enabled to see here not only the act of
seduction, but also its consequences; each main period of pregnancy
is represented by at least one individual. Afterwards, as is fitting,
comes childbirth, and in its train infanticide or suicide. It is only to be
regretted that Schiller’s “child-murderess” has not been included as
well; the editor, however, may have thought that it was enough to
have the well-known cry: “Joseph, Joseph”, etc.,a echoing through
the whole book. A stanza — to the tune of a well-known lullaby — may
serve as evidence of the quality of these songs of seduction. Herr
Ludwig Kohler sings on page 299:

a From Schiller’s poem “Die Kindesmorderin”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

575

Weep, Mother, weep!

She is sick, your cherished one!

Weep, Mother, weep!

For her innocence is gone!

Your advice: “Child, guard your honour”,

Was entirely lost upon her!

In general, the Album is a true apotheosis of crime. Besides the
above-mentioned numerous cases of infanticide, Herr Karl Eck sings
of a “Forest Misdeed”,3 and the Swabian Hiller who murdered his
five children is celebrated in a short poem by Herr Johannes Scherr,
and in an interminable poem by Ursa Major himself. One would
think that one was at a German fair where the organ-grinders keep
on playing their murder stories:

Crimson child, you child of hell,

Say, what was your life like here?

You and your dread murder-hole
Made all people shrink in fear.

Human beings ninety-six
Perished by the villain’s deed,

For the killer broke their necks,

Took their lives with utmost speed, etc.

It is difficult to make a choice among these young and vigorous
poets and their productions, which are full of vital warmth; for
basically it does not matter whether the name is Theodor Opitz or
Karl Eck, Johannes Scherr or Joseph Schweitzer, the things are all
equally beautiful. Let us take some at random.

First of all we find once again our friend Bootes-Smrntg, who is
engaged in elevating spring to the speculative heights of true
socialism (p. 35b):

Awake! Awake! For Spring will soon be coming —

O’er hill and dale with movement of the storm
Unfettered Freedom makes her way —

What kind of freedom this is, we are told at once:

Why gaze upon the Cross so slavishly?

No free man to that god will bend the knee
Who felled the oak-trees of the Fatherland
And made the very gods of Freedom flee!

that is to say, the freedom of the Germanic primeval forests, in whose
shade Bootes can tranquilly reflect on “socialism, communism and
humanism”, and foster at will “the thorn of hate for Tyranny”.
About this last we learn:

There is no rose that blooms without a thorn,

a “Waldfrevel.” — Ed.

b “Friihlingsruf.” — Ed.

576

Frederick Engels

consequently, it can be hoped that the budding “rose” Andromeda,
too, will soon find an appropriate “thorn” and then no longer
“appear so wooden” to herself as previously. Bodtes acts also in the
interests of the Veilchen, which it is true did not then exist, by
publishing here an unusual poem, the title and refrain of which
consist of the words: “Buy violets! Buy violets! Buy violets!” (p. 38).

Herr N..h..sa exerts himself with praiseworthy zeal to bring into
being 32 pages of long-line verse, without advancing a single idea in
it. There is, for instance, a “Proletarians’ Song” (p. 166). The
proletarians come out into the lap of nature — if we wanted to say
from where they come out, there would be no end to it — and after long
preambles finally decide on the following apostrophe:

Nature, O thou mother of all beings.

All thou wouldst with love refresh and strengthen,

All thou hast to utmost bliss predestined,

Great beyond all ken thou art and lofty!

Listen, then, to our resolves most holy!

Hear what we would vow to thee sincerely!

Bear the tidings to the sea, ye rivers,

Spring wind, breathe it through the darkling pine-trees!

With that a new theme has been broached and for quite a space the
poem continues in this strain. Finally, in the fourteenth stanza, we
learn what the people really want; it is, however, not worth the
trouble of putting it down here.

It is likewise interesting to make the acquaintance of Herr Joseph
Schweitzer c:

Thought is soul and action is flesh in this our earthly life;

Husband is the spark of fire, and the deed his own true wife,

to which is adjoined in an unaffected way what Herr J. Schweitzer
wants, namely:

I will crackle, I will blaze. Freedom’s light
In wood and plain,

Till the enormous water-bucket. Death,

Shall douse my spark again (p. 213).

His wish is fulfilled. In these poems it “crackles” to his heart’s
content, and he is also a “spark”, as is evident at the first glance. But
he is a delightful “spark”:

a Neuhaus. — Ed.
b “Proletarierlied”. — Ed.

c The following quotations are from Schweitzer’s poems “Die Parole” and
“Leipzig”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

577

Head held high and knuckles clenched.

There I stand, made happy, free (p. 216).

In this posture he must have been priceless. Unfortunately, the
Leipzig August riot156 drew him on the street and there he witnessed
moving things:

A tender human bud, before me, in full view —

O shame, O horror! —

Sucking up in greedy draughts its shining drops of deadly deui (p. 217).

Hermann Ewerbeck, too, does not disgrace his Christian name. On
page 227 he begins a “Battle-Song”3 which was undoubtedly already
roared out by the Cherusci in the Teutoburg Woods:

For Freedom, for the being
Within , we bravely fight.

Is this perhaps a battle-song for pregnant women?

And not for gold or medals,

Nor yet for vain delight.

We struggle hard for future generations etc.

In a second poem [p. 229]b we learn:

Human feelings all are holy.

Purest thought is holy too,

When they meet with thought and feelings
Pass away all spirits do.

Just as such verses are liable to make our “thought and feelings”
“pass away”.

We warmly love the Good,

The Beautiful in this world,

We toil and we create
Ever in man’s true field;

and our labour in this field is rewarded with a harvest of sentimental
doggerel that even Ludwig of Bavaria could not have produced.

Herr Richard Reinhardt is a quiet and sedate young man. He
“steps in gentle calm along the path of quiet self-development” and
provides us with a birthday poem “An die junge Menschheit”, in
which he contents himself with singing of:

The loving sun of Freedom pure,

Pure Love’s own radiant Freedom light.

And loving Peace’s friendly light [pp. 234, 236].

Schlachtlied”. — Ed.
‘Lied” {“Song”). — Ed.

578

Frederick Engels

These six pages raise our spirits. “Love” occurs sixteen times,
“light” seven times, the “sun” five times, “freedom” eight times, not
to speak of “stars”, “lucidities”, “days”, “raptures”, “joys”, “peace”,
“roses”, “passions”, “truths” and other subsidiary spices of human
existence. If one has had the good fortune to be sung of in this way,
one can truly go in peace to the grave.

But why should we dwell on these bunglers when we can behold
such masters as Herr Rudolf Schwerdtlein and Ursa Major? Let us
leave all those rather amiable but very imperfect attempts to their
fate and turn to the consummation of socialist poesy!

Herr Rudolf Schwerdtlein sings:

‘'Boldly Onwards" a h

We are the riders of life. Hurrah (ter1)

Whither, O riders of life?

We’re riding into death. Hurrah!

We’re blowing on our trumpets. Hurrah (ter)

What blow you on your trumpets?

We blast, we blow of death. Hurrah!

The army is left behind. Hurrah (ter)

What does it do behind?

It sleeps the eternal sleep. Hurrah!

Hark! Do enemy trumpets sound? Hurrah (ter)

O woe to you, poor trumpeters!

We ride now into death. Hurrah! [Pp. 199, 200.]

O woe, you poor trumpeter! — We see that the rider of life not only
rides with jubilant courage into death, he rides just as audaciously
into the most utter nonsense, in which he feels as happy as a tick in a
sheep.r A few pages farther on the rider of life opens “fire”d:

We are so wise, we know a thousand things,

Progress impetuous has brought us far —

Yet when your boat across the waves you steer.

The spirits aye will rustle round your ear [p. 204].

One could wish that a really solid body will very soon “rustle round
the ear” of the rider of life so as to drive away the spirit rustling.
Just bite an apple! Betwixt it and your teeth
Before your very eyes a ghost will rear.

Seize the strong mane of some fine thoroughbred —

A spectre rises by the stallion’s ear.

a Rudolf Schwerdtlein, “Frisch auf”. — Ed.

Ter — three times. — Ed.

c Cf. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene 3. — Ed.
d Rudolf Schwerdtlein, “Feuer!”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

579

Something also “rises” on each side of the head of the rider of
life, but it is not “the stallion’s ear” —

Around you thoughts hyena-like spring up,

When you embrace the one your heart has chosen.

It is the same with the rider of life as with other valiant warriors.
He does not fear death, but “spectres”, “ghosts” and especially
“thoughts” make him tremble like an aspen leaf. To save himself
from them he decides to set the world on fire, “to dare a universal
conflagration”:

Destroy — that’s the great watchword of the age.

Destroy- — that’s discord’s only resolution;

See that the body and the soul are burned:

Nature and Being must be purified.

Like metal in a crucible, the world
In blasting flames must now be newly formed.

In fiery judgment on the world, the demon
Initiates the new world history [p. 206].

The rider of life has hit the nail on the head. The discord of the
only resolution in the great watchword of the age of thorough
purification of nature and being is precisely that the metal in the
crucible is burnt to become body and soul, that is to say, the
destruction of the new history of the world is the new formation of
the fiery judgment on the world or, in other words, the demon take
the world in the fire of the beginning.

Now for our old friend Ursa Major. We have already mentioned
the Hilleriad.3 This begins with a great truth:

You people in God’s grace can never grasp
How hard the world seems to a ragamuffin;

One never can get free [p. 256],

After compelling us to listen to the whole story of woe in the
minutest detail, Ursa Major once again breaks out into “hypocrisy”:

Woe, woe to you, you heartless, wicked world —

Accursed be for ever! And you too, damned gold!

It was through you this murder did occur.

You played your part, you monstrous money-bags!

The children’s blood is on your head alone!

The truth is spoken by my poet’s mouth,

I fling it in vour face, and I await

The striking of the hour that spells revenge! [P. 262.]

Might it not be thought that Ursa Major commits here an act of the
most terrifying recklessness by “flinging truths from his poet’s

Hermann Piittmann’s poem “Johann Hiller”. — Ed.

580

Frederick Engels

mouth into people’s faces”? There is no need for alarm, however,
one need not tremble for his liver and his safety. The rich do as little
harm to the Great Bear as he does to them. But, in his opinion, one
should either have had old Hiller’s head cut off or:

The softest down on earth you ought to lay
With greatest care beneath the murderer’s head,

So — for your blessing — he while fast asleep
Forgets the love of which you have deprived him.

And when he wakes there ought to be around him
Two hundred harps that sound sweet melodies,

So never more the children’s dying gasps
Shall lacerate his ear or break his heart.

And more still for atonement — it should be
The loveliest that love can e’er contrive —

Perhaps that would relieve your sense of guilt,

And set your conscience finally at rest (p. 263).

That is indeed the acme of bonhomie, the very truth of true
socialism! “For your blessing!”, “a tranquil conscience!” Ursa Major
has become childish and relates tales for the nursery. It is known
that he still “awaits the striking of the hour that spells revenge”.

But much more cheerful still than the Hilleriad are the “Grave-
yard Idylls”.3 First of all he sees the burial of a poor man and
laments of his widow, then that of a young man who was killed in the
war and who was the sole support of his aged father, then that of a
child murdered by its mother, and finally that of a rich man. Having
seen all that, he begins to “think” and lo and behold

...my vision bright and clear became

And deep into the grave its rays did pierce; [p. 284]

unfortunately, it did not become sufficiently “clear” to pierce “deep
into” his verse.

The most mysterious was revealed to me.

On the other hand, what has been “revealed” to all the world,
namely, the appalling worthlessness of his verse, has remained
completely “mysterious” to him. And the clear-sighted Bear saw how
“in a trice the greatest miracles occurred”. The fingers of the poor
man turned into coral and his hair into silk, and consequently his
widow became very rich. From the soldier’s grave flames leap out
that devour the king’s palace. From the child’s grave there springs up
a rose whose perfume penetrates to the mother in her prison — and
the rich man, owing to the transmigration of souls, becomes an
adder, with regard to which Ursa Major allows himself the private

“Friedhofsldvllen”. — Ed.

The True Socialists

581

satisfaction of causing it to be trampled by his youngest son! And so,
in the view of Ursa Major, “nevertheless, we shall all attain
immortality”.

By the way, our Bear has after all some courage. On page 273, he
throws out a challenge in thunderous tones to “his misfortune”; he
defies it, for:

Within my heart a mighty lion sits —

It is so valiant, powerful and swift —

Against its claws you should be on your guard!'*

Indeed, Ursa Major “feels the lust for battle”, and “fears no
wounds”.

Printed according to the manu-
script

Written probably between January
and April 1847
First published in German
in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe,
Erste Abteilung, Bd. 5, 1932

Hermann Puttmann, “Trotz des Proletaries”. — Ed.

NOTES

AND

INDEXES

NOTES

The “Theses on Feuerbach” were written by Karl Marx in Brussels, probably in
April 1845. They are to be found in Marx’s notebook of 1844-47 under the
heading “1) ad Feuerbach”. They were published by Engels in the Appendix to
the 1888 edition of his work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy. In the foreword to this edition Engels called this important theoretical
document “Theses on Feuerbach”, hence the title. To render the brief notes,
which Marx had not intended for publication, more comprehensible to the reader,
Engels made a number of editorial changes when preparing the “Theses” for the
press. Both versions of the “Theses” — i.e., Marx’s original text and that edited by
Engels — have been included in this volume. The original text was first published
in German and Russian in 1924 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the
Central Committee of the C.P.S.U., Moscow ( Marx-Engels Archives, Book I); in
English it was published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology,
Parts I & III, Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., London, 1938. The first English
translation of the edited version was published in the Appendix to Frederick
Engels, Feuerbach. The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy, Chicago, 1903. p. 3

2 Marx refers to the following chapters in Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums :

“Die Bedeutung der Creation im Judenthum” and “Der wesentliche Standpunkt
der Religion”. p. 3

3 These notes were evidently intended by Engels for Chapter I of the first volume of

The German Ideology. They were first published in the language of the original by

the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in
1932 (Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 5); in English they were
published for the first time in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German
Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964. p. 1 1

4 According to the doctrine of the Saint-Simonists, every individual is endowed with

love, intellect and physical activity. Hence he should receive moral, mental and
physical education (cf. Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere annee, 9th
lecture). p. 12

586

Notes

5 This item, which was published anonymously, is the reply of the authors of The
Holy Family to the anti-critique contained in Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik
Ludwig Feuerbachs” published in Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Bd. 3. It is
roughly identical with a passage in Chapter II, Volume I of The German Ideology
(see this volume, pp. 1 12-14). In English the item was first published in Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.

p. 15

6 The review was published anonymously under the heading “Die heilige Familie

oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten. Von F. Engels
und K. Marx, Frankfurt, 1845”. p. 15

7 The German Ideology — Die deutsche Ideologie. Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie
in ihren Reprasentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stimer, und des deutschen Sozialismus
in seinen verschiedenen Propheten — is the joint work of Marx and Engels which they
wrote in Brussels in 1845 and 1846.

Marx and Engels decided to write a philosophical work in which they intended
to counterpose their materialist conception of history to the idealist views of the
Young Hegelians and to Feuerbach’s inconsistent materialism in the spring of
1845, when Engels came to Brussels (early in April) and Marx outlined to him his
materialist conception, which had nearly taken shape by then. Marx’s “Theses on
Feuerbach” were written in connection with this project. In the autumn of 1845
the project took the form of a definite plan to write a two-volume work directed
against the Young Hegelians and the “true socialists”. In November 1845 Marx
and Engels began writing the book. In the course of their work the plan and
composition of the book were changed several times. Moses Hess was enlisted to
write two chapters. But the chapter against the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge,
which Hess wrote for Volume I, was excluded from the final version of The
German Ideology, and the other chapter, dealing with the “true socialist”
Kuhlmann, which Hess wrote for Volume II, was edited by Marx and Engels.

Work on The German Ideology was in the main terminated in April 1846; it
seems, however, that the authors continued working on Chapter I of the first
volume until the middle of July, but it was never completed. The draft of the pre-
face for Volume I was written by Marx not later than the middle of August. Work
on Volume II was completed by early June 1846. Engels’ work The True Socia-
lists, which was intended as the concluding chapter of Volume II, was written
between January and April 1847.

In 1846 and 1847 Marx and Engels made repeated attempts to find a publisher
in Germany for their work, but they were unsuccessful. This was due partly to
difficulties made by the police and partly to the reluctance of the publishers to
print the work, since their sympathies were on the side of the trends which Marx
and Engels criticised. The only Chapter of The German Ideology known to be
published during their lifetime was Chapter IV of Volume II, which appeared in
the journal Das Westphdlische Dampftoot in August and September 1847.

The text of a few pages in Chapter II of Volume I (pp. 1 12-14 of this volume)
is similar to that of an anonymous item dated “Brussels, November 20” (see this
volume, pp. 15-18), which appeared in the Gesellschaftsspiegel, Heft VII, Januar
1846 (in the section “Nachrichten und Notizen”).

Neither the title of the whole work nor the headings of the first and the second
volumes have survived in the manuscript. They are, however, mentioned by Marx
in his article “Declaration against Karl Griin” (see present edition, Vol. 6) and
have been taken from there.

Notes

587

The manuscript of chapters II and III of Volume II is missing, and it is
possible that the “Circular against Kriege” by Marx and Engels and Engels’ article
“German Socialism in Verse and Prose” (see present edition, Vol. 6) formed part
of this volume.

The manuscript is in a rather poor condition, the paper has turned yellow and
is damaged in places. “The gnawing criticism of the mice”, as Marx wrote later in
his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, has left its mark on a
number of pages, other pages are missing. The Preface to The German Ideology and
some of the alterations and additions are in Marx’s hand; the bulk of the
manuscript, however, is in Engels’ hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and
some passages in Chapter III of Volume I. which are in Joseph Weydemeyer’s
hand. As a rule, the pages are divided into two parts: the main text is on the left
side while additions and changes are on the right. A number of passages were
crossed out by the authors, and a few more passages were crossed out by Eduard
Bernstein (this has been pointed out by S. Bahne in his article “ Die Deutsche
Ideologic von Marx und Engels. Einige Texterganzungen”, published in the
International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part I).

Words and passages which have become unreadable have been reconstructed
on the basis of the unimpaired parts whenever possible; they are enclosed in
square brackets. Wherever it was necessary to insert a few words to clarify the
meaning, they are likewise printed in square brackets. Gaps in the manuscript
are indicated in footnotes. Marginal notes as well as the most important of
the crossed-out passages are given in footnotes which are indicated by
asterisks, whereas the editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters. Passages
crossed out by Bernstein, wherever it was possible to decipher them, have been
restored.

After Engels’ death the manuscript of The German Ideology came into the hands
of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, who in the course of 37
years published less than half of it. Part of Chapter III, “Saint Max”, was
published by Bernstein in 1903-04 (see Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, “III.
Sankt Max”, in Dokumente des Sozialismus, Stuttgart, Bd. Ill, Hefte 1-4 and 7-8,
Januar-April and Juli-August 1903; Bd. IV, Hefte 5-9, Mai-September 1904).
Another part of this chapter — “My Self-Enjoyment” — was brought out in 1913
(see Karl Marx, “Mein Selbstgenuss”, in Arbeiter-Feuilleton, Miinchen. Nr. 8 and 9,
Marz 1913). Gustav Meyer published the introductory pages of “The Leipzig
Council” and Chapter II, “Saint Bruno”, in 1921 (see Friedrich Engels und Karl
Marx, “Das Leipziger Konzil”, in Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,
47. Band, 3. Heft, Tubingen, 1921). Chapter I, “Feuerbach”, the most important
chapter of The German Ideology, was first published by the Institute of
Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in Russian in 1924
( Marx-Engels Archives, Book I) and in German in 1926 ( Marx-Engels Archiv,
I. Band). The whole work as it has come down to us (except for the six pages which
were found later and printed in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII,
1962, Part 1) was first published in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung,
5. Band, in 1932 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee
of the C.P.S.U.

The first English version of Chapter I, translated from the Russian, was
published in the American journal The Marxist No. 3, July 1926. A small part of
this chapter, translated from the German, was published in the British journal The
Labour Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 3, March 1933. An English translation of Chapter I,
“Feuerbach”, and Volume II, “Der wahre Sozialismus”, was published by
Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., London, 1938, under the title The German Ideology,

588

Notes

Parts I & III. The first English translation of the whole work, except for one
passage from Chapter I of the first volume (p. 29 of the manuscript), was issued by
Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1964. p. 19

The manuscript of Chapter I of the first volume of The German Ideology has come
down to us in the form of several separate passages written at different times and
in different circumstances. This is due to changes which Marx and Engels made in
the general plan of the book as the work proceeded.

Originally Marx and Engels began writing a purely critical work dealing
simultaneously with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. Then they
decided to discuss Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner in separate chapters (“II. Saint
Bruno” and “HI. Saint Max”), and the first chapter was conceived as a general
introduction stating their own views in opposition to Feuerbach’s. Therefore they
crossed out nearly all passages referring to Bauer and Stirner in the original
manuscript and transferred them to chapters II or III. Thus, the chronologically
first part, which formed the original nucleus of the chapter on Feuerbach (29
pages numbered by Marx), took shape.

Then they wrote Chapter II and began to work on Chapter III. In the course
of their critical analysis of Stirner’s book Der Einzige undsein Eigenthum, Marx and
Engels made various theoretical digressions in which they developed their
materialist conception of history. Two of these digressions were subsequently
transferred by them from the chapter on Stirner to that on Feuerbach. The
first — consisting of 6 pages — was written in connection with the criticism of
Stirner’s idealist view that history was dominated by spirit (this digression was
originally in the section “D. Hierarchy”; see this volume, p. 175). The second
theoretical digression — consisting of 37 pages — was written in connection with
the criticism of Stirner’s views of bourgeois society, competition and the
interrelation between private property, state and law (this latter passage from the
chapter on Stirner was replaced by another; see this volume, p. 355, etc.). These
two digressions formed the chronologically second and third parts of the chapter
on Feuerbach.

The pages of these three parts were numbered by Marx (1 to 72) and thus form
the rough copy of the whole chapter. Pages 3-7 and 36-39 of the manuscript have
not been found.

Marx and Engels then started revising the rough copy and writing out a clean
copy, the beginning of which exists in two versions. We have thus four more or less
independent parts of the manuscript (three parts of rough copy and one of clean
copy).

In the present edition the chapter on Feuerbach is accordingly divided into
four parts. Part I consists of the combined fragments of the clean copy. Part II
comprises the original nucleus of the whole chapter. Parts III and IV are the two
theoretical digressions transferred from the chapter on Stirner. Each part is a
consistent, logically coherent whole. The parts complement one another and
together they are a comprehensive exposition of the materialist conception of
history.

The content of the four parts can be summarised in the following way:
I. Introduction, general remarks concerning the idealism of German post-Hegeli-
an philosophy. Premises, essence and general outline of the materialist conception
of history. II. Materialist conception of historical development and conclusions
from the materialist conception of history. Criticism of the idealist conception of
history in general, criticism of the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach in particular.
III. Origin of the idealist conception of history. IV. Development of the produc-

Notes

589

tive forces, of the division of labour and of the forms of property. The class struc-
ture of society. The political superstructure. Forms of social consciousness.

Comparison of the different parts of the manuscript makes it possible to bring
out the logical structure of the chapter, form an idea of the authors’ intentions and
reconstruct the general plan of the chapter. First Marx and Engels give a general
description of German ideology, then they counterpose the materialist conception
of history to the idealist conception, and, finally, criticise the latter. The central
part of the chapter has the following structure: the authors’ premises; their
materialist conception of history; the conclusions following from their theory.
The materialist conception of history is presented as follows: development
of production — intercourse (social relations) — political superstructure —

forms of social consciousness. On the whole, the plan of the chapter, recon-
structed in accordance with the intentions of Marx and Engels, can be for-
mulated thus:

1) General description of German ideology (Part I, introductory remarks and
Section 1; Part II, Section 1).

2) Premises of the materialist conception of history (Part I, Section 2).

3) Production (Part II, Sections 3-5; Part I, Section 3; Part IV, Sections 1-5),
intercourse (Part IV, Sections 6-10), political superstructure (Part IV, Section 11),
forms of social consciousness (Part III, Section 1; Part IV, Section 12).

4) Conclusions from and summary of the materialist conception of history (Part II,
Sections 6-7; Part I, Section 4).

5) Critique of the idealist conception of history in general, and of the Young Hegelians
and Feuerbach in particular (Part II, Sections 8-9 and 2; Part III, Section 1).

In the manuscript the chapter as a whole has the heading: “I. Feuerbach.”
While sorting out Marx’s papers alter his death in 1883, Engels found among
them the manuscript of The German Ideology and reread it. At the end of the first
chapter he made the note: “I. Feuerbach. Opposition of the materialist and
idealist outlooks.”

The parts of this chapter are subdivided into sections. These subdivisions have
been made by the editors, who also supplied most of the headings. All headings
supplied by the editors and all editorial insertions are enclosed in square brackets.

The pages of the manuscript are indicated in this volume. The sheets of the
clean copy, partly numbered by Engels (sheets 3 and 5), are indicated thus: |sh. 1 1,
(sh. 2 j, etc. The pages of the first version of the beginning of the clean copy, which
were not numbered by the authors, are indicated thus: [p. 1 1, p. 2 1, etc. The pages
of the three rough drafts, which were numbered by Marx, are indicated thus:

1 1 1, 2j, etc.

The arrangement of the different parts of the manuscript within Chapter I
and its subdivision into sections are the same as in the Russian version first
published in the journal Voprosy Filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), Nos. 10 and
11, Moscow, 1965. In English this version was first published by Progress
Publishers in Vol. 1 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (in three
volumes), Moscow, 1969. p. 27

A reference to David Friedrich Strauss’ main work, Das Leben Jesu (Bd. 1-2,
Tubingen, 1835-1836); with it began the philosophical criticism of religion and the
disintegration of the Hegelian school into Old and Young Hegelians. p. 27

Diadochi — the generals of Alexander the Great who, after his death, fought one
another in a fierce struggle for power. In the course of this struggle (end of
the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd century B.C.) Alexander’s Empire, an

590

Notes

unstable military and administrative union, disintegrated into several indepen-
dent states. p. 27

11 In The German Ideology the term "Verkehr” (“intercourse”) is used in a very broad
sense. It comprises both the material and spiritual intercourse of individuals, social
groups and whole countries. Marx and Engels show that material intercourse, and
above all the intercourse of men in the process of production, is the basis of all
other forms of intercourse. The terms Verkehrsform (form of intercourse),
Verkehrsweise (mode of intercourse), Verkehrsverhaltnisse (relations of intercourse)
and Produktions- und Verkehrsverhaltnisse (relations of production and intercourse)
are used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology to express the concept
“relations of production”, which at that time was taking shape in their minds.

p. 32

12 The term “ Stamm ” used by Marx and Engels has been translated as “tribe” in this

volume. It had a wider range of meaning at the time of the writing of The German
Ideology than it has at present. It was used to denote a community of people
descended from a common ancestor, and comprised the modern concepts of
“gens” and “tribe”. The first to define and differentiate these concepts was the
American ethnologist and historian Lewis Henry Morgan in his main work Ancient
Society; or. Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism
to Civilisation ( 1 877). Morgan showed for the first time the significance of the gens
as the primary cell of the primitive communal system and thereby laid the
scientific foundations for the history of primitive society as a whole. In his work
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) Engels showed the
far-reaching significance of Morgan’s discoveries and his concepts “gens” and
“tribe” for the study of primitive society. p. 32

13 The agrarian law proposed by Licinius and Sextius, Roman tribunes of the people,
was passed in 367 B.C. as a result of the struggle waged by the plebeians against
the patricians. It prohibited Roman citizens from holding more than 500 yugera
(about 309 acres) of common land (ager publicus).

By civil wars in Rome is usually meant the struggle between various groups of
the Roman ruling class which started at the end of the 2nd century B.C. and
continued until 30 B.C. These wars, together with the growing class
contradictions and slave revolts, accelerated the decline of the Roman Republic
and led to the establishment, in 30 B.C., of the Roman Empire. p. 33

Here and below Marx and Engels refer mainly to Feuerbach’s work Grundsatze der
Philosophic der Zukunft and quote different expressions and terms from it.

p. 39

15 See the section “Geographische Grundlage der Weltgeschichte” in Hegel’s

Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 42

16 See, for instance, Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society,

Edinburgh, 1767, and Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction
of the Origin of Commerce from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, London,
1764. p. 42

17 The reference is to the following works published in the Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbiicher early in 1844: two articles by Marx, “On the Jewish Question” and
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”, and

Notes

591

two by Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” and “The Condition
of England. Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843” (see present
edition, Vol. 3). These works marked the final transition of Marx and Engels to
materialism and communism. p. 47

18 Cf. Romans 9:16: “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,

but of God that sheweth mercy.” p. 48

19 The conclusion that the proletarian revolution could only be carried through in all

the advanced capitalist countries simultaneously, and hence that the victory of the
revolution in a single country was impossible, was expressed even more definitely
in the “Principles of Communism” written by Engels in 1847 (see present edition,
Vol. 6). In their later works, however, Marx and Engels expressed this idea in a
less definite way and emphasised that the proletarian revolution should be
regarded as a comparatively long and complicated process which can develop first
in individual capitalist countries. In the new historical conditions V. I. Lenin came
to the conclusion, which he based on the specific circumstances of operation of the
law of the uneven economic and political development of capitalism in the epoch
of imperialism, that the socialist revolution could be victorious at first even in a
single country. This thesis was set forth for the first time in his article “On the
Slogan for a United States of Europe” (1915) (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,
Vol. 21). p. 49

20 In the German original the term “ Haupt - und Staatsaktionen ” (“principal and
spectacular actions”) is used, which has several meanings. In the 17th and the first
half of the 18th century, it denoted plays performed by German touring
companies. The plays, which were rather formless, presented tragic historical
events in a bombastic and at the same time coarse and farcical way.

Secondly, this term can denote major political events. It was used in this sense
by a trend in German historical science known as “ objective historiography” . Leopold
Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He regarded “ Haupt - und Staatsak-
tionen” as the main subject-matter to be set forth. Objective historiography, which
was primarily interested in the political and diplomatic history of nations,
proclaimed the pre-eminence of foreign politics over domestic politics and
disregarded the social relations of men and their active role in history. p. 50

21 The Continental System, or the Continental Blockade, proclaimed by Napoleon I in

1806, after Prussia’s defeat, prohibited trade between the countries of the
European Continent and Great Britain. This made the import into Europe of a
number of products, including sugar and coffee, very difficult. Napoleon’s defeat
in Russia in 1812 put an end to the Continental System. p. 51

Marseillaise , Carmagnole , Qa ira — revolutionary songs of the period of the French
Revolution. The refrain of the last song was: “ Ah 1 fa ira, fa ira, fa ira. Les
aristocrates a la lanteme!” (“Ah, it will certainly happen. Hang the aristocrats on the
lamp-post!”) p. 53

23 See Note 20. p. 55

24 An allusion to a type of light literature which was widely read at the end of the
18th and the beginning of the 19th century; many of its characters were knights,

592

Notes

robbers and ghosts, e.g., Abdllino, der grosse Bandit by Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
published in 1793, and Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Rduberhauptmann by Christian
August Vulpius (1797). p. 55

25 Rhine-song (“Der deutsche Rhein”) — a poem by Nicolaus Becker which was widely

used by nationalists in their own interest. It was written in 1840 and set to music by
several composers. p. 57

26 A reference to Feuerbach’s article “Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums in

Beziehung auf den Einzigen und sein Eigenthum ” published in Wigand’s
Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Bd. 2. The article ends as follows: “Hence F[euerbach] is
not a materialist, nor an idealist, nor a philosopher of identity. What is he then.-*
He is the same in his thought as he is actually, the same in spirit as in the flesh, the
same in his essence as in his sense-impressions — he is a man or, rather, since F
simply places the essence of man in the community, he is a communal man, a
communist .” p. 57

27 This section formed originally part of Chapter III and followed directly after the
passage to which Marx and Engels refer here (see this volume, pp. 173-76).

p. 62

Industrie extractive (extractive industry) — a term which the French economist
Charles Dunoyer used in his book De la liberte du travail to denote hunting,
fishing and mining. Cf. Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter I, § 2 (see present
edition, Vol. 6). p. 63

29 The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 by the Manchester manufacturers
Cobden and Bright. The English Corn Laws, first adopted in the 15th century,
imposed high tariffs on imported cereals in order to maintain high prices for them
in the home market. In the first third of the 19th century, in 1815, 1822 and later,
several laws were passed changing the conditions for corn imports, and in 1828 a
sliding scale was introduced which raised import tariffs on com when prices in the
home market declined and, on the other hand, lowered tariffs when prices rose in
Britain.

The League widely exploited the popular discontent over the raising of corn
prices. In its efforts to obtain the repeal of the Corn Laws and the establishment of
complete freedom of trade, it aimed at weakening the economic and political
positions of the landed aristocracy and lowering the cost of living thus making
possible a lowering of the workers’ wages.

The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy
over the Com Laws ended with the repeal of these laws in 1846. p. 64

30 An ironical allusion to Stimer’s “union” (“Verein”) — a voluntary association of

egoists (see this volume, pp. 389-417). p. 65

31 During the following years, Marx and Engels changed their evaluation of the

medieval peasant uprisings both as a result of their studies of the peasants’
struggle against feudalism and also of the revolutionary actions of the peasants
in 1848 and 1849. Engels, in particular, in his work The Peasant War in
Germany (written in 1850) showed the revolutionary nature of the peasant
risings and the part they played in undermining the very basis of the feudal
system. p. 66

Notes

593

32 This fact is given by Harrison in his Description of England in The First and Second

Volumes of Chronicles.... First collected and published by Raphaell Holinshed, William
Harrison, and others..., London, 1587. Marx mentions it also in Capital. See Karl
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, Chapter XXVIII,
Footnote 2 to p. 687. p. 69

Navigation Laws — a series of acts passed in England to protect English shipping
against foreign competition. The best known was that of 1651, directed mainly
against the Dutch, who controlled most of the carrying trade. It prohibited the
importation of any goods not carried by English ships or the ships of the country
where the goods were produced, and laid down that British coasting trade and
commerce with the colonies were to be carried on only by English ships. The
Navigation Laws were modified in the early 19th century and repealed in 1849
except for a reservation regarding coasting trade, which was revoked in 1854.

p. 70

34 England was conquered by the Normans in 1066. The foundations of the

Kingdom of Sicily, proclaimed in 1 130 and embracing Sicily and South Italy with
Naples as its centre, were laid down in the latter half of the 1 1th century by Robert
Guiscard, leader of the Norman conquerors. p. 83

35 The term “ burgerliche Gesellschaft ” (“civil society”) is used in two distinct ways by

Marx and Engels: 1) to denote the economic system of society irrespective of the
historical stage of development, the sum total of material relations which
determine the political institutions and ideological forms, and 2) to denote the
material relations of bourgeois society (or that society as a whole), of capitalism.
The term has therefore been translated according to its concrete content and the
given context either as “civil society” (in the first case) or as “bourgeois society” (in
the second). p gg

36 The Italian town of Amalfi became a prosperous trade centre in the 10th and 11th

centuries. Its maritime law ( Tabula Amalphitana) was valid throughout Italy and
widely used in other Mediterranean countries in the Middle Ages. p. 91

37 The Leipzig Council — this is an allusion to the fact that the works of Bruno Bauer

and Max Stirner, the two “church fathers” criticised in this section, were
published in Leipzig. p. 94

The Battle of the Huns ( Hunnenschlacht ), one of the best-known pictures by
Wilhelm von Kaulbach, painted in 1834-37, is based on the battle fought by the
Huns and the Romans at Chalons in 451. Kaulbach depicts the ghosts of fallen
warriors fighting in the air above the battleground. p. 94

39 A reference to the potato blight of 1845 which affected Ireland, many regions of

England and some parts of the Continent. It led to a failure of the potato crop and
devastating famine in Ireland. p. 94

40 Santa Casa (The Sacred House) — the name of the headquarters of the Inquisition

in Madrid. p. 96

41 “Positive philosophy ” — a mystical religious trend (Christian Hermann Weisse,
Immanuel Hermann Fichte Junior, Anton Gunther, Franz Xaver von Baader, and

594

Notes

Friedrich Schelling in his late period), which criticised Hegel’s philosophy from
the right. The “positive philosophers” tried to make philosophy subservient to
religion, denied the possibility of rational cognition and proclaimed divine
revelation the only source of “positive” knowledge. They called “negative” every
philosophy which recognised rational cognition as its source. p. 98

42 Oregon was claimed by both the U.S.A. and Britain. The struggle for the
possession of Oregon ended in June 1846 with the division of the territory
between the U.S.A. and Britain.

For the Com Laws see Note 29. p. 98

43 The expression “to fight like Kilkenny cats” originated at the end of the 18th

century. During the Irish uprising of 1798 the town of Kilkenny was occupied by
Hessian mercenaries serving in the British army, who used to amuse themselves by
watching fights between cats with their tails tied together. One day, a soldier,
seeing an officer approaching, cut off the cats’ tails with his sword and the cats ran
away. The officer was told that the cats had eaten each other and only their tails
remained. p. 106

44 An allusion to the conflict between the Young Hegelian Karl Nauwerck and the

professors of the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin University (see Chapter III of
The Holy Family, the present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 17-18). p. 110

45 The structure of this chapter parodies Sdrner’s manner of presenting his material.
In his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum Stirner often interrupts his exposition
with “episodical insertions” which are not directly connected with the subject-
matter. Poking fun at this manner, Marx and Engels begin the chapter with a
reference to Stirner’s article “Recensenten Stirners” (published in Wigand’s
Vierteljahrsschrift, Vol. 3), which they ironically call “Apologetical Commentary”.
It is Stirner’s reply to the criticism of his book by Szeliga, Feuerbach and Hess.
Then follows a lengthy “episodical insertion”, which takes up nearly the whole of
this long chapter. It contains a critical analysis of Stimer’s book, and only at the
end of the chapter, in Section 2, do Marx and Engels return to the
above-mentioned article. The structure of the “episode” corresponds to that of
the book they criticised, and, just like the latter, it comprises two parts ironically
entided “The Old Testament: Man”, and “The New Testament: ‘Ego’”. The
corresponding parts in Stirner’s book are entitled “Der Mensch” (“Man”) and
“Ich” (“Ego”). In the subheadings Marx and Engels also use the names of
chapters and sections of Stirner’s book, in many cases giving them an ironical twist.

p. 117

46 Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipzig, Wigand, 1845, was

published in October-November 1844. Engels was one of the first readers of this
book, for Wigand sent him the advance proofs. This is mentioned in the letter
Engels wrote to Marx on November 19, 1844. p. 117

Part One of Stirner’s book, “Der Mensch” (“Man”), has the following structure:
I. Ein Menschenleben (A Man’s Life): II. Menschen der alten und neuen Zeit
(People of Ancient and Modern Times): 1. Die Alten (The Ancients); 2. Die
Neuen (The Moderns) — §1. Der Geist (The Spirit), §2. Die Besessenen (The
Possessed), §3. Die Hierarchie (Hierarchy); 3. Die Freien (The Free Ones) —
§1. Der politische Liberalismus (Political Liberalism), §2. Der sociale Libera-

Notes

595

lismus (Social Liberalism), §3. Der humane Liberalismus (Humane Liberalism).

p. 121

48 The campaigns of Sesostris — according to the Greek historians Herodotus and
Diodorus, campaigns by a legendary Egyptian pharaoh to conquer countries in
Asia and Europe.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt — a reference to the landing of the French army,
commanded by General Bonaparte, in Egypt in the summer of 1798 and to the
subsequent campaigns of this army to subdue Egypt and Syria. Napoleon’s
expedition to Egypt ended in failure in 1801. p. 136

49 The seven wise men — a term usually applied to seven eminent Greek philosophers
and statesmen who lived in the 6th century B.C.: Bias, Chilon, Cleobulus,
Periander, Pittacus, Solon and Thales.

Neo-academists — philosophers belonging to the Athenian school of neo-
platonism. p. 138

50 Brahm (or Brahma, Brahman) — the basic category of ancient Hindu idealist
philosophy denoting the essence of the universe, impersonal, immaterial,
uncreated, illimitable, timeless.

Om — ritualistic word invoking Brahma. p. 141

51 From 987, when Hugh Capet claimed the throne of France, until the French
Revolution, the kings of France were in fact members of the Capet dynasty, for
both the Valois, who ruled from 1328, and the Bourbons, who followed them in
1589, were branches of the Capet family. Louis XVI, a member of the Bourbon
dynasty, was executed in January 1793 by order of the National Convention.

p. 146

52 Until the revolution of 1848 smoking was prohibited in the streets of Berlin and in
the Tiergarten (a park in the city) under penalty of a fine or corporal punishment.

p. 162

53 The attempt which Enfantin made in 1832 to establish a labour commune in

Menilmontant, then a suburb of Paris, led to legal proceedings against the
Saint-Simonists, who were accused of immorality and the spread of dangerous
ideas. On August 28, 1832, Enfantin was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment
but was released before serving the full term. Afterwards, Enfantin and several of
his followers went to Egypt, where he worked as an engineer. p. 164

54 Wasserpolacken (literally water Poles) — nickname given to the Silesian Poles in

Germany. p. 164

55 A reference to the bombardment of Chinese maritime towns and ports on
the Yangtse and other rivers by the British naval and land forces during the
First Opium War, Britain’s war of conquest against China waged from 1839
to 1842. With this war began the transformation of China into a semi-colony.

56 P- 166

“ Deux amis de la liberte" (“Two friends of freedom”) — pseudonym used by

Fr. Marie Kerverseau and G. Clavelin, authors of the Histoire de la Revolution de

1 789, a work in twenty volumes published in Paris at the end of the 18th and the

beginning of the 19th century. p. 178

596

Notes

“ Habits bleus” (“blue coats”) — a name given to the soldiers of the French Republic
at the end of the 18th century because of the colour of their uniform. In a wider
sense it was applied to the Republicans as distinct from the royalists, who were
called Blancs (“Whites”). p. 179

See Note 18.

p. 180

59 Kupfergraben — the name of a canal in Berlin. Hegel lived on the Kupfergraben

embankment. p. 184

60 Hanseatic League ( Hanse ) — a league of German and other North-European

merchant cities, situated on the Baltic and the North Sea and the rivers flowing
into them. At one time it also included severalDutch cities. The heyday of the
Hanseatic League was the second half of the 14th century. It began to decline and
to disintegrate towards the end of the 15th century but continued to exist formally
until 1669. p. 194

An allusion to the Continental System. See Note 21.

p. 195

Tugendbund (League of Virtue) — secret political society which was founded in
Prussia in 1808. Its principal aims were to foster patriotic feelings among the
population and to organise the struggle for the liberation of Germany from the
Napoleonic occupation and for the establishment of a constitutional system in the
country7. At Napoleon’s request the Tugendbund was formally dissolved in 1809
by the King of Prussia but it actually continued to exist until the end of the Napole-
onic wars. p. 196

63 Cercle social — an organisation established by democratic intellectuals in Paris in

the first years of the French Revolution. Its chief spokesman, Claude Fauchet,
demanded an equalitarian division of the land, restrictions on large fortunes and
employment for all able-bodied citizens. The criticism to which Fauchet and his
supporters subjected the formal equality proclaimed in the documents of the
French Revolution prepared the ground for bolder action in defence of the
destitute by Jacques Roux, Theophile Leclerc and other members of the
radical-plebeian “ Enrages ”. p. 198

64 The end of this sentence from the words "the bourgeois ... express ... the rule of
the proprietors ...” and the following five paragraphs up to and including the
words “customs duties which hampered commerce at every turn, and they” are
part of the manuscript discovered in the early 1960s and first published
(in German) in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part 1.
The text is written on two pages, the beginning of the first one is damaged.

p. 198

65 The motion of the Bishop of Autun (Talleyrand) — one of the representatives of
the clergy who supported the decision of the deputies of the Third Estate to
transform the States-General (a consultative organ based on social estates) into a
National Assembly (later, the Constituent Assembly) — was designed to extend the
powers of the Assembly. It proposed that the deliberations of the Assembly should
no longer be restricted to matters mentioned in the Cahiers de doleances — lists of
grievances and instructions given by the constituents of each estate to their
deputies in connection with the convocation of the States-General (Etats

Notes

generaux) — and that the deputies should have the right to decide each question
according to their own judgment.

Bailliages — bailiwicks in pre-revolutionary France, also electoral districts
during the elections to the States-General; divisions des ordres — each bailliage was
divided into three social estates: the nobility, the clergy and the Third Estate. The
figure 431 is apparently a slip of the pen, for there were 531 divisions des ordres.

p. 199

66 Jeu de paume — a tennis-court in Versailles. On June 20, 1789, the deputies of the
Third Estate, who on June 17 proclaimed themselves a National Assembly, met in
this building (because their official meeting-place had been closed by order of the
King) and took a solemn oath not to separate until they had given France a
constitution.

Lit de justice — sessions of the French parliaments (the supreme judicial bodies
in pre-revolutionary France) in the presence of the King. Orders by the King
issued at these sessions had the force of law. The reference here is to the meeting
of the States-General on June 23, 1789. At this meeting the King declared the
decisions adopted by the Third Estate on June 1 7 null and void and demanded the
immediate dispersal of the Assembly, but the deputies of the Third Estate refused
to obey and continued their deliberations. p. 199

67 Jacquerie — French peasant revolt which took place in May and June 1358 and was
supported by the poor in a number of cities.

A peasant rebellion under the leadership of Wat Tyler flared up in England in the
summer of 1381. It had the support of the lower strata of the London population,
who opened the gates of the capital to the insurgents. Some demands of the latter,
for example, the abolition of the Statute of Labourers, were also in the interest of
the plebeian townsmen.

Evil May Day — name given to the uprising of the poorer citizens of London on
May 1, 1517. It was directed against the increasing power of foreign merchants
and usurers.

A peasant uprising under the leadership of Robert Kett (a local squire and owner of a
tannery) took place between June and August 1549 in East Anglia. Among the
insurgents were many unemployed weavers, ruined artisans and other destitute
people. With the help of the town poor the insurgents seized Norwich.

p. 204

68 This refers to events connected with the Chartist movement in England. When
Parliament rejected their first Petition in July 1839, the Chartists attempted to call
a general strike (a “sacred month”). At the beginning of November 1839 a rising
of miners took place in South Wales, which was crushed by police and government
troops. In July 1840, the National Charter Association was founded which united
a considerable number of the country’s local Chartist organisations. In August
1842, after the second Potition had been rejected by Parliament, spontaneous
action of the workers took place in many industrial regions of the country. In
Lancashire and in a considerable part of Cheshire and Yorkshire the strikes were
very widespread, and in a number of places they grew into spontaneous uprisings.

p. 205

Free-thinkers ( Freijeister — by spelling the word according to the Berlin dialect
pronunciation the authors have given the name an ironical note) — an allusion to
“The Free”, a group of Berlin Young Hegelians which came into being in the first
half of 1842. Among its principal members were Bruno Bauer, Edgar Bauer,

598

Notes

Eduard Meyen, Ludwig Buhl and Max Stirner. The existing system was criticised
by “The Free” in an abstract way, their statements were devoid of real
revolutionary content, their ultra- radical form often compromised the democratic
movement. Many of “The Free” renounced radicalism in the following years.

For the criticism of “The Free” in Marx’s early writings see present edition,
Vol. 1, pp. 287, 390, 393-95. p. 205

70 Congregatio de propaganda fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith) — an

organisation founded by the Pope in 1622 in order to propagate Catholicism in all
countries and to fight heretics. p. 214

71 This refers to the movement for a democratic electoral reform whose members —

republican democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists — gathered round La Reforme,
an opposition newspaper published in Paris from 1843. The supporters of
La Reforme were also known as the socialistic democratic party. p. 217

72 Capitularies — legislative or administrative ordinances of the Frankish kings. Many

of these enactments legalised serfdom and were designed to ensure stricter
fulfilment by the peasants of the numerous obligations imposed on them (Charle-
magne’s well-known capitulary referred to in the text is presumably the Capi-
tulare de villis — Capitulary on Royal Estates — issued about A.D. 800). Some of
these acts threatened peasants who were disobedient, took part in revolts and so
on with severe punishment (for example, Charlemagne’s Capitulary on Saxony of
782 directed against the fight of the free Saxon peasants against the Frankish
conquerors). p. 220

73 An allusion to disturbances which took place in Catalonia at the beginning of July

1845 and were caused bv the attempt of the government to introduce a law under
which one man out of five was to serve in the army. The disturbances were brutally
suppressed. p. 220

74 Barataria — the island of which Sancho Panza was made governor in Cervantes’
Don Quixote. p. 233

lo Dioscuri — Castor and Pollux (or in Greek Polydeuces), heroes of classical
mythology, the twin sons of Zeus, by whom they were turned into the constellation
Gemini (the Twins); as such they were considered to be the patrons of seamen.

p. 234

76 Rumford broth — thin soup for the poor prepared from bones and cheap
substitutes; the recipe for it was made up at the end of the 18th century by Count
Rumford (alias Benjamin Thompson). p. 235

Banqueroute cochonne (swinish bankruptcy) — the 32nd of the 36 types of bankrupt-
cy described by Fourier in his work Des trots unites extemes published in the journal
La Phalange, 1845, Vol. 1. Excerpts from this work are given by Engels in his
article “A Fragment of Fourier’s on Trade” (for the passage about “swinish
bankruptcy” see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 638). 236

78 Part Two of Stirner’s book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum — “Ich” (“Ego”) — is
subdivided as follows: I. Die Eigenheit (Peculiarity); II. Der Eigner (The Owner):

Notes

599

1. Meine Macht (My Power), 2. Mein Verkehr (My Intercourse), 3. Mein
Selbstgenuss (My Self-Enjoyment); III. Der Einzige (The Unique). p. 240

Orphanage- Francke — the nickname stems from the fact that August Hermann
Francke founded an orphanage and several other philanthropic institutions for
children in Halle at the end of the 17th century. p. 249

80 —

The maxim “Know Thyself' was written over the entrance of Apollo’s temple at
Delphi. p. 249

81 •

According to Bentham’s utilitarian ethics, actions were to be considered good if
they produced a greater amount of pleasure than suffering. The compilation of
long tedious lists cataloguing pleasure and suffering, and their subsequent
balancing in order to determine the morality of an action, is here called by Marx
and Engels “Bentham’s book-keeping”. p. 259

82 In the middle of the 19th century Moabit was a north-western suburb of Berlin;

Kopenick — a south-eastern suburb of Berlin, and the Hamburger Tor (Hamburg
Gate) — a gate at the northern boundary of Berlin. p. 263

83 Nante the loafer ( Eckensteher Nante) — a character in Karl von Holtei’s play Ein
Trauerspiel in Berlin. On the basis of this prototype Fritz Beckmann, a well-known
German comedian, produced a popular farce Der Eckensteher Nante im
Verhor. The name Nante became a byword for a garrulous, philosophising wag,
who seizes every opportunity to crack stale jokes in the Berlin dialect, p. 272

84 Emperor Sigismund handed over Jan Huss to the Council of Constance (1414-15)
despite the safe conduct he had granted him.

Francis I, who was defeated at Pavia (1525) and taken prisoner by Charles V,
was released only after renouncing his claims to Milan and Burgundy (Madrid
Treaty of 1526). But after his release he repudiated the treaty. p. 274

85 Blocksberg — popular name of several German mountains and in particular of the

Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains. According to German folklore,
the witches meet to celebrate their sabbath on the Blocksberg. p. 282

86 According to legend, the early Christian Saint Ursula and “her eleven thousand

virgins” were martyred in Cologne. The alleged number of virgins is probably due
to the name of Ursula’s companion, Undecimilla, which in Latin means “eleven
thousand”. p. 283

87 Caius — a name adopted by many textbooks and other works on formal logic to

denote a human being, especially in syllogisms. p. 287

88 Apparently a reference to Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel’s book Biographie eines Pudels.

p. 299

Spanso bocko — one of the most cruel forms of corporal punishment, which was
used by the colonialists in Surinam (in the north-eastern part of South America).

p. 308

90 The uprising of Negro slaves which took place in Haiti in 1791 marked the
beginning of a revolutionary movement against the colonial regime. Toussaint

21—2086

600

Notes

Louverture, the leader of the insurgents, played an outstanding part in the war of
liberation which the Negroes waged against the French, English and Spanish
colonialists. In the course of the struggle, which ended with the proclamation of
Haiti’s independence in January 1804, slavery was abolished and subsequently the
estates of the planters were divided among the former slaves. p. 308

91 The Historical School of Law — a trend in German historiography and jurispru-
dence in the late 18th century. The representatives of this school, Gustav Hugo,
Friedrich Karl Savigny and others, sought to justify the privileges of the nobility
and feudal institutions by referring to the inviolability of historical traditions.

Romanticists — adherents of reactionary romanticism in the social sciences who
tried to vindicate the Middle Ages and the feudal system and to oppose them to
the ideas of bourgeois Enlightenment, democracy and liberalism. Among the
prominent ideologists of romanticism were Louis Gabriel Bonald, Joseph de
Maistre, Karl Ludwig Haller and Adam Muller.

For a criticism of these two trends see Marx’s works: “The Philosophical
Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” and “Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction” (present edition, Vols. 1 and 3).

p. 314

92 The “Ten Tables ” — the original version of the “Twelve Tables” (lex duodecim
tabularum), the oldest legislative document of the Roman slave-owners’ state.
These laws were enacted as a result of the struggle which the plebeians waged
against the patricians during the republican period in the middle of the 5th
century B.C.; they became the point of departure for the further development of

Roman civil law. p. 318

93 For the Com Laws see Note 29. p. 325

This refers to the Law of 1844 which made it very difficult to obtain a divorce. The
Bill was drafted in 1842 on the instructions of Frederick William IV by Savigny,
one of the founders of the Historical School of Law (see Note 91), who was Prus-
sian Minister for the Revision of Laws from 1842 to 1848. p. 339

95 Leges barbarorum (laws of the barbarians) — codes of law which originated between
the 5th and the 9th centuries and were, in the main, a written record of the
customary or prescriptive law of the various Germanic tribes.

Consuetudines feudorum (feudal customs) — a compilation of medieval feudal
laws which was made in Bologna in the last third of the 12th century.

Jus talionis (right of retaliation) — the right of retaliation by inflicting a
punishment of the same kind (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”).

The old German Gewere — the legitimate rule of a free man over a piece of
land where he exercised sovereign authority and was responsible for the
protection of every person and thing.

Compensatio — the balancing of claim and counter-claim against each other.

Satisfactio — reparation, or atonement, for an offence; it can also mean
satisfying a creditor not by repaying the debt incurred but by some other service.

p. 342

96 The Holy Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood) — league of Spanish towns set up at the
end of the 15th century with the approbation of the king, who sought to make use
of the bourgeoisie in the struggle between absolutism and the powerful feudal

Notes

601

lords. From the middle of the 16th century the armed detachments of the
Hermandad performed police duties. The term “Holy Hermandad” was later
used ironically for the police. p. 344

97 Spandau — at that time a Prussian fortress west of Berlin with a jail for political

prisoners. p. 344

98 Landwehrgraben — a canal in Berlin which extended up to Charlottenburg, then a
Berlin suburb. It is possible that Marx and Engels are alluding to Egbert Bauer’s
publishing house in Charlottenburg, where Szeliga’s works were published.

p. 345

The following section is a critical analysis of the second section, “Mein Verkehr”
(“My Intercourse”), Chapter Two, Part Two of Stirner’s book Der Einzige und sein
Eigenthum. From the introductory remarks of Marx and Engels to this part of their
work (see this volume, p. 240) it follows that they intended to use the heading
“My Intercourse” and to mark it with the letter “B”, for the preceding section is
called “A. Meine Macht” (“A. My Power”), and the following one “C. Mein
Selbstgenuss” (“C. My Self-Enjoyment”). The section “B. My Intercourse”
probably consisted of three subsections: “I. Society”, “II. Rebellion” and
“III. Union.” The first three subdivisions and the beginning of the fourth
subdivision of the section “I. Society” are missing. When Paul Weller was
preparing The German Ideology for publication as Band 5, Erste Abteilung of
Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), he suggested that the subsection “I. Society”
may have consisted of five parts. The heading of the first is unknown, but it might
have been “1. Die verstirnerte Gesellschaft” (“1. Stirnerised Society”), or “1. Die
Gesellschaft im allgemeinen” (“1. Society in General”), or “1. Die
menschliche Gesellschaft” (“1. Human Society”). That of the second was
probably “2. Die Gesellschaft als Gefangnisgesellschaft” (“2. Society as Prison
Society”); of the third, “3. Die Gesellschaft als Familie” (“3. Society as a Family”);
of the fourth, “4. Die Gesellschaft als Staat” (“Society as State”), of which only the
last portion has been found. The fifth part has been preserved in its entirety and is
called “5. Die Gesellschaft als biirgerliche Gesellschaft” (“5. Society as Bourgeois
Society”). p. 346

100 The September Laws — reactionary laws promulgated by the French Government in

September 1835. They restricted the rights of juries and introduced severe
measures against the press. The clauses directed against the latter provided for
higher amounts to be deposited as security by periodical publications, and made
the people responsible for publications directed against private property and the
existing political regime liable to imprisonment and heavy fines. p. 347

101 The reference is apparently to the Commissions of the Estates in the Landtags

(provincial diets), which were instituted in Prussia in June 1842. Elected by the
Landtags from their deputies according to the estates principle, they formed a
single advisory body known as the “United Commissions”. With the help of this
body, which was a mockery of representative institution, Frederick William IV
hoped to enforce new taxes and obtain a loan. p. 348

102 When the Corn Laws (see Note 29) were repealed in 1846, a small, temporary
tariff on the import of corn was retained until 1849.

21*

602

Notes

Magna Charta Libertatum — the charter which the insurgent barons, who were
supported by knights and townsmen, forced King John of England to sign at
Runnvmede on June 15, 1215. Magna Charta limited the powers of the king,
mainly in the interests of the feudal lords, and also contained some concessions to
the knights and the towns. p. 353

103 Under the leadership of Themistocles the Greeks defeated the Persians in the
naval battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.

After the Greek War of Independence (1821-29) against Turkish rule, Britain,
Russia and France compelled the new Greek state to adopt a monarchical form of
government, and placed the 17-year-old prince Otto of Bavaria on the Greek
throne. p. 353

104 Marx and Engels are alluding to Voltaire’s description of Habakkuk. There is a

direct reference to it in their article “Konflikte zwischen Polizei und
Volk. — Uber die Ereignisse auf der Krim” published on July 9, 1855. The
expression “ capable de tout ” (capable of anything) is used here ironically, i.e.,

“capable of nothing’’. p. 355

105 An allusion to the fact that in the summer of 1845 Stirner attempted to earn his

living by selling milk since he could not exist on the proceeds from his literary
work. But the undertaking proved a complete failure, and the curdled milk had to
be poured down the drain. p. 358

106 yjjg Pandects are part of a compendium of Roman civil law ( Corpus juris civilis)

made by order of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in the 6th century. They
contained extracts from the works of prominent Roman jurists. p. 364

107 A reference to the British and Dutch East India Companies which were founded

at the beginning of the 17th century. They had the monopoly of trade with the
East Indies anti played a decisive part in the establishment of the British and

Dutch colonial empires. p. 371

108 The Preussische Seehandlungsgesellschaft (Prussian Maritime Trading Company) was

founded as a commercial and banking company in 1772 and granted a number of
important privileges by the state. It advanced big loans to the government and in
fact became its banker and broker. p. 375

109 ^

Levons-nous! (Let us rise up!) — part of the motto of the Revolutions de Paris, a

revolutionary -democratic weekly which was published in Paris from July 1789 to
February 1794 (until September 1790 its editor was Elisee Loustalot). The entire
motto was: “ Les grands ne nous paraissent grands que ~ ,«*ris sommes a genoux :
levons-nous /” (“The great only seem great to us because we are on our knees:
Let us rise up!”). p. 380

110 Der hinkende Botte, also called Der hinkende Bote (The Lame Messenger) — a name

given to a sort of popular almanac which contained rather stale news relating to
events of the preceding year. p. 384

1,1 Straubinger — a name for German travelling journeymen. In their works and
letters Marx and Engels frequently applied it ironically to artisans who remained
under the influence of backward guild notions and believed that society could

Notes

603

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

abandon large-scale capitalist industry and return to the petty handicraft
stage of production. p. 391

Mozart’s Requiem was completed, on the basis of his manuscript notes, by Franz
Xaver Siissmayer. p. 393

Organisers of labour — an allusion to the utopian socialists (in particular Fourier
and his followers) who put forward a plan for the peaceful transformation of
society by means of associations, that is, by “organisation of labour’’, which they
opposed to the anarchy of production under capitalism.

Some of these ideas were used by the French petty-bourgeois socialist Louis
Blanc in his book Organisation du travail (Paris, 1839) in which he proposed that
the bourgeois state should transform contemporary society into a socialist society.

p. 393

See Note 18. p. 396

Willenhall, a town in Staffordshire, England, with a considerable iron industry.

p. 401

An allusion to the fact that Max Stirner dedicated his book to his wife Marie
Dahnhardt. The phrase “the title spectre of his book” was derived from Stirner’s
phrase “the title spectre of her book”. In his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
he used it in relation to Bettina von Arnim’s work, Dies Buck gehort dem Konig.

p. 401

This refers to one of the main principles of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen” ( Declaration des droits de I’homme et du citoyen), a preamble to the
Constitution adopted by the French Convention in 1793 during the revolutionary
dictatorship of the Jacobins. The last article, the 35th, of the Declaration reads:
“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is the
imprescriptible right and the irremissible duty of the people as a whole and of
each of its sections.” p. 403

According to the Bible (Genesis 41 : 18-20), the Egyptian pharaoh dreamed that
seven fat cows were eaten by seven lean cows but the latter remained just as lean as
before. According to the interpretation given to the pharaoh by Joseph, the dream
meant that Egypt would have rich harvests for seven years to be followed by seven
years of drought and famine. p. 406

The Customs Union ( Zollverein ) of German states (initially they numbered 18),
which established a common customs frontier, was set up in 1834 and headed by
Prussia. By the 1840s the Union embraced most of the German states, with the
exception of Austria, the Hanseatic cities (Bremen, Hamburg, I.iibeck) and a few
small states. Brought into being by the necessity to create an all-German market,
the Customs Union became a factor conducive to the political unification of
Germany. p. 411

The Cyrenaic school — a school of ancient Greek philosophy founded at the
beginning of the 4th century B.C. by Aristippus of Cyrene, a pupil of Socrates.
The Cyrenaics were agnostics, adopted a critical attitude to religion and regarded
pleasure ( hedone ) as the aim of life. p. 417

p. 431

121

See Note 59.

604

Notes

122

12S

124

125

126

127

128

See Note 45. p. 444

A reference to the writers of Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) — a literary
group that emerged in Germany i In the 1830s and was influenced by Heinrich
Heine and Ludwig Borne. The Young Germany writers (Karl Gutzkow, Ludolf
Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt and others) came out in defence of freedom of
conscience and the press. Their writings reflected opposition sentiments of the
petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals. The views of the Young Germans
were politically vague and inconsistent; soon the majority of them turned into
mere liberals. P- 457

The Levellers were a democratic-republican trend in the English bourgeois
revolution of the mid- 17th century. The reference in the text is probably to the
most radical section of the Levellers known as True Levellers, or Diggers. The
Diggers represented the poorest strata that suffered both from feudal and
capitalist exploitation in the town and the countryside. In contrast to the mass of
the Levellers, who wanted to retain private property, the Diggers advocated
common property and other ideas of equalitarian communism. p. 461

National reformers — members of the National Reform Association founded in the
U.S.A. in 1845. The Association, which consisted mainly of artisans and workers,
and declared that every worker should have the right to a piece of land free of
charge, started a campaign for a land reform against the slave-owning planters
and land speculators. It also put forward a number of other democratic demands
such as abolition of the standing army, abolition of slavery and introduction of the
ten-hour working day. p. 466

Humaniora (humanities) — the subjects the study of which was considered
essential for the knowledge of ancient classical culture; the humanists of the
Renaissance and their followers regarded these subjects as the basis of humanistic
education. p. 467

Neue Anekdota — collection of articles by Moses Hess, Karl Griin, Otto Liming and
other representatives of “true socialism” published in Darmstadt at the end of

May 1845. p. 483

This chapter was published by Marx separately as a review in the monthly
publication Das Westphalische Dampfboot in August and September 1847. Before
that, in April 1847, Marx had published a “Declaration against Karl Griin”. He
stated in it that he intended to publish a review of Griin’s book Die soziale
Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien (see present edition, Vol. 6) in the Westphalische
Dampfboot. But the first instalment of this article was published only in August
1847. The editors explained in a note that the article could not be published
earlier because “for over two months the manuscript was sent from one German
town to another without reaching us”.

The work was published in the Westphalische Dampfboot as Marx’s article (the
name of the author was mentioned in the editorial note). Consequently one can
assume that in contrast to Vol. I, which was written jointly by Marx and Engels,
some chapters of Vol. II of The German Ideology are probably the individual work
of one or other of them. But since the manuscript of this chapter of Vol. II is in
Engels’ handwriting, it is likely that Engels helped to write it. The copy sent to the
Westphalische Dampfboot was probably made from this manuscript. The manuscript

Notes

605

and the published text are practically identical. Comparatively few changes were
made in the text itself and it is possible that some of these were by the editors of
the journal. In this volume, variants affecting the meaning are given in footnotes.
Where the manuscript is damaged the missing passages have been taken from the
printed text. Such passages have not been specially marked (either by square
brackets or footnotes) in this chapter. p. 484

129 For Young Germany see Note 123. p. 484

1 30

Cabinet Montpensier — a reading room in the Palais-Royal, formerly a palace of the
Princes of Orleans in Paris. p. 485

131

Probably an allusion to the organisers of the first political parties of American
workers and artisans founded at the end of the 1820s — the Republican Political
Association of the Working Men of the City of Philadelphia, the New York
Working Men’s Party (their leaders were Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen,
Thomas Skidmore) and other labour associations in various American towns.
These organisations had a democratic programme, advocated land reform and
other social measures and supported the demand for a ten-hour working day.
Although they were short-lived (they existed only until 1834), had a local
character, and were composed of factions holding rather heterogeneous views,
these first workers’ parties gave an impetus to the incipient labour movement in
the United States and helped to disseminate utopian socialist ideas, for many of
their members were supporters of this trend. p. 489

132 -phe States-General— the supreme executive and legislative organ of the Nether-

lands or the Republic of the United Provinces, as the country was called from
1579 to 1795. This assembly consisted of representatives of the seven provinces.
The trading bourgeoisie played a dominant part in it. p. 494

133 Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve a ses Contemporains was written by Saint-Simon in

1802 and published anonymously in Paris in 1803. p. 498

134 The Newton Council— a plan to set up such a council was put forward by

Saint-Simon in his book Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve a ses Contemporains. Its
purpose was to create conditions that would enable scientists and artists to develop
their talents freely. Funds were to be raised by public subscription. Each
subscriber was to nominate three mathematicians, three physicists, three chemists,
three physiologists, three writers, three painters and three musicians. The sum
collected by subscription was to be divided among the three mathematicians,
physicists, etc., who had received the greatest number of votes and had thus
become members of the Newton Council. p. 498

135 The reference is to the following sentences:

“The aim of all social institutions must be to improve the moral, intellectual
and physical condition of the most numerous and poorest class.

“All inherited privileges, without exception, are abolished.

“To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works”.

p. 506

The first schism of the Saint-Simonian school occurred in November 1831, caused
by Enfantin’s and Bazard’s increasingly discordant views on religion, marriage
and the family. p. 508

606

Notes

137 Menilmontant — then a suburb of Paris where Enfantin, who after Bazard’s death
became the acknowledged leader of the Saint-Simonian school, the “father
superior” of the Saint-Simonists, tried to establish a labour commune in 1832.

Enfantin’s work Economic politique et Politique was printed in book form in Paris
in 1831, after having been published earlier as a series of articles in the newspaper
Le Globe. p. 509

138 Le Livre nouveau (The New Book) — a manuscript containing an exposition pf the

Saint-Simonian doctrine. It was drawn up by the leaders of the Saint-Simonian
school, which was headed by Enfantin, in the course of a series of meetings held in
July 1832. Among the leaders present were Barrot, Fournel, Chevalier, Duverier
and Lambert. The authors intended the book to become the “new Bible” of the
Saint-Simonian doctrine. Extracts from the Livre nouveau and other information
about it can be found in Reybaud’s book Etudes sur les reformateurs ou socialistes
modernes. p. 509

139 Fourier’s series — a method of classification which Fourier used to analyse various

natural and social phenomena. With the help of this method he tried, in
particular, to work out a new social science based on the doctrine of attraction and
repulsion of passions, which he regarded as the principal factor of social
development (passions, in their turn, were classified by Fourier into groups or
series). In this method Fourier combines unscientific and fantastic elements with
rational observations. p. 511

140 See Note 113. p. 519

141 Patristic philosophy — the teachings of the Fathers of the Church (3rd to 5th

century). p. 520

142 The spontaneous popular risings which took place in many parts of France, and

also in Paris, in 1775 were caused by crop failure and famine. The feudal
aristocracy which was against Turgot’s reforms used these uprisings to oust him
from the post of Controller-General of Finance. In the spring of 1776, Turgot was
dismissed and the reforms he had introduced (free trade in grain, abolition of
some feudal privileges and of the guilds) were rescinded. p. 525

143 Unlike the other extant chapters of Volume II, which are in Engels’ handwriting,
the manuscript of Chapter V is in Joseph Weydemeyer’s hand and “M. Hess” is
written at the end. In December 1845, the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel No. 6
carried an article by Hess under the heading “Umtriebe der Kommunistischen
Prophet en” which discussed the same subject in a similar way as this chapter. It is
probable that Chapter V was written by Fless, copied by Weydemeyer and edited
by Marx and Engels.

Die Neue Welt oder das Reich des Geistes auf Erden, the book examined in this
chapter, was published anonymously in 1845. It consists of lectures by Georg
Kuhlmann delivered in the Swiss communities of the League of the Just. These
communities were founded by Wilhelm Weitling. The League of the Just was a
secret organisation of German workers and artisans, which had branches in
Germany, France, Switzerland and England. The ideas of “true socialism” were at
that time widespread among the members of the League, many of whom were
artisans living abroad. A criticism of Kuhlmann’s activities and his book can be

Notes

607

found in the article “Zur Geschichte des Urchristen turns” written by Engels in
1894. p. 531

144 Engels’ work The True Socialists ( Die wahren Sozialisten ) is a direct continuation of
the second volume of The German Ideology.

By the beginning of 1847 the development of “true socialism” had led to the
formation of various groups (e.g., the Westphalian, Saxon and Berlin groups)
within the general framework of this trend. Engels, therefore, decided to add a
critical examination of the different “true socialist” groups to Volume II of The
German Ideology. (See his letter to Marx of January 15, 1847.) The result was the
manuscript called here The True Socialists. He continued to work on it at least until
the middle of April, for an issue of the journal Die Grenzboten published on April
10, 1847, is mentioned in the text. The manuscript has no heading and, to judge
by the ending, the work remained unfinished. It was for the first time published
by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in
German in 1932. In English it was published for the first time in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.

p. 540

145 Here and below the names of constellations are used ironically to designate some
of the “true socialists” who contributed to various German periodicals such as Dies
Buch gehort dem Volke, Das Westphalische Dampfboot and Gesellschaftsspiegel. The
“Lion” denotes Hermann Kriege; the “Crab” Julius Helmich; Rudolf Rempel is,
probably, one of the “Twins”, the other is Julius Meyer; the “Ram” stands for
Joseph Weydemever; the “Bull” for Otto Liining.

Engels’ remark that the “Lion” has become a “tribune of the people” is an
allusion to the fact that Hermann Kriege, who had emigrated to America, became
editor of the New York weekly Der Volks-Tribun. p. 541

146 These associations were formed in a number of Prussian cities in 1844-45 on the

initiative of the German liberal bourgeoisie, which, alarmed by the uprising of the
Silesian weavers in the summer of 1844, founded them to divert the German
workers from the struggle for their class interests. p. 542

147 Eridanus — a constellation in the southern hemisphere, depicted as a river.

The Weser-Dampfboot, which was banned at the end of 1844, appeared from
January 1845 under the title Das Westphalische Dampfboot; it was edited by Otto
Liining, who had been an editor of the Weser-Dampfboot. p. 542

148 Marx and Engels’ work “Circular against Kriege”, which had appeared in the

newspaper Der Volks-Tribun in June 1846, was also published in the July issue of
the journal Das Westphalische Dampfboot. But Otto Liining, the editor of the latter,
arbitrarily changed the text by inserting his own additions written in the spirit of
“true socialism”. p. 543

149 Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, was depicted on the cover of the journal

Gesellschaftsspiegel. p. 549

150 Engels is referring to a passage in his essay “German Socialism in Verse and
Prose” published in the Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung in the autumn of 1847. The
essay is closely connected with the second volume of The German Ideology and may
originally have formed part of the missing text of this volume (see Note 7).

p. 551

608

Notes

151

This may be a reference to the petty-bourgeois newspaper Dorfzeitung published
in Elberfeld from 1838 to 1847. p. 552

152 Books comprising more than twenty printed sheets were exempt from prelimi-

nary censorship, according to the press laws existing in a number of German
states. The Rheinische Jahrbiicher, which were published by Hermann Piittmann,
had over twenty sheets. p. 553

153 In partibus infidelium — literally in parts inhabited by unbelievers. The words are
added to the title of Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses
in non-Christian countries. In the figurative sense, they mean “not really
existing”.

Engels is ironically alluding to poems glorifying the future of the as yet
non-existent German fleet, namely, Georg Herwegh’s “Die deutsche Flotte”
(1841) and Ferdinand Freiligrath’s “Flotten-Traume” (1843) and “Zwei Flaggen”
(1844). p. 569

154 See Note 22. p. 572

155 In his Album Piittmann published seven poems by Heinrich Heine including

“Pomare”, “Zur Doctrin” and “Die schlesischen Weber”, as well as several poems
by Georg Weerth, among them the “Handwerksburschenlieder”, “Der Kanonen-
giesser” and “Gebet eines Irlanders”. p. 574

156 A reference to the fact that on August 12, 1845, Saxon troops opened fire on a
mass demonstration in Leipzig. A military parade, which was arranged to mark
the arrival of Crown Prince Johann, served as a pretext for a protest
demonstration against the persecution by the Saxon government of the
“German-Catholics” movement and one of its leaders, the clergyman Johannes
Ronge. The movement, which arose in 1844 and gained ground in a number of
German states, was supported by considerable sections of the middle and petty
bourgeoisie. The “German Catholics” did not recognise the supremacy of the
Pope, rejected many dogmas and rites of the Roman Catholic Church, and sought
to adapt Catholicism to the needs of the rising German bourgeoisie.

The events of August 12, 1845, were described by Engels in his report “The
Late Butchery at Leipzig. — The German Working Men’s Movement” published
in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star (see present edition, Vol. 4).p. 577

NAME INDEX

Abd-el-Kader (1807-1 883) — Algerian
emir, one of the Arab leaders in the
national liberation struggle in Moroc-
co and Algeria (1832-47) against the
French conquerors. — 164

Aikin, John( 1747-1 822) — English phy-
sician, historian and radical publicist.
— 71

Alexander of Macedon ( Alexander the
Great) (356-323 B.C.) — military

leader and statesman of antiquity;
King of Macedon (336-323 B.C.).—
67, 353, 428

Alexis, Willibald (pseudonym of Georg
Wilhelm Heinrich Haring) (1798-
1871) — German writer, author of
many historical novels. — 336

Al Hussein, Abu AH Ben Abdallah Ibn
(Ebn) Sina (Lat. Avicenna) — see Ibn
( Ebn ) Sina, Abu Ali

Andromeda — see Otto (-Peters), Luise

Anneke, Friedrich (1818-1872) — Prus-
sian artillery officer, discharged
from the army for his political views;
joined in the democratic and work-
ing-class movement, in the mid-
forties a “true socialist’’. — 548,
573

Anselm of Canterbury ( 1033-1 109) — me-
dieval theologian and philosopher,
early scholastic. — 381

Arago, Dominique Francois (1786-1853)
— French astronomer, physicist and
mathematician; politician, moderate
republican. — 151, 394

Argenson, Marc Rene de Voyer, Marquis
de (1771-1842) — French politician;
took part in the French Revolution;
follower of Babeuf. — 508

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) — Greek phi-
losopher.— 138-40, 142, 143, 161,
461, 512

Arminius ( Hermann ) the Cheruscan (17
B.C.-A.D. 21) — leader of the resis-
tance of Germanic tribes against
Roman rule, annihilated a Roman
army in the Teutoburg Woods in
A.D. 9. — see Kriege, Hermann

Arndt, Ernst Moritz (1769-1860) — Ger-
man writer, historian and philologist;
took part in the German people’s war
of liberation against Napoleon. —
351

Amim, Bettina ( Elisabeth ) von (1785-
1859) — German writer of the Ro-
mantic school, also known as Bettina
Brentano. — 336

Aston, Luise (1814-1871) — German
writer. — 573

610

Name Index

Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavia-
nus (63 B.C.-A.D. 14) — first Roman
Emperor (27 B.C.-A.D. 14).— 40

Babeuf, Francois Noel ( Gracchus ) (1760-
1797) — French revolutionary, advo-
cate of utopian egalitarian commu-
nism, organiser of the “conspiracy of
equals”.— 210, 226, 325, 552, 553

Bacon, Francis, Baron Verulam, Viscount
St. Albans (1561-1626) — English
philosopher, naturalist and histori-
an.—172, 486

Bailly, Jean Sylvain (1736-1793) —
French astronomer, prominent fig-
ure in the French Revolution, ad-
vocate of constitutional monarchy. —
198

Bar ere de Vieuzac, Bertrand (1755-1841)
— French lawyer, leading figure in
the French Revolution, member of
the National Convention, Jacobin;
later took part in the Thermidor
coup d’etat (July 1794). — 178, 198-
99, 508

Baring, Alexander (1774-1848) — head
of a banking house in London. — 544

Barmby, John Goodwyn (1820-1881) —
English clergyman, advocate of
Ch ristian socialism . — 46 1

Barreaux (Jacques Vallee, Sieur des)
(1599-1673) — French poet.— 112

Barrot, Camille Hyacinthe Odilon (1791-
1873) — French politician, leader of
the liberal dynastic opposition dur-
ing the July monarchy. — 546

Bauer, Bruno (1809-1882) — German
philosopher, Young Hegelian. — 15-
23, 29, 30, 39, 41, 42, 52-54, 56-59,
94-103, 111-16, 138, 165, 198, 210,
214, 235, 236, 238, 336, 355, 378,
432, 433, 441, 442, 447, 451, 572

Bauer, Edgar (1820-1886) — German
philosopher and writer. Young

Hegelian; brother of Bruno Bauer.

—336

Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706) — French
sceptic philosopher, critic of religi-
ous dogmatism. — 98

Bayrhoffer, Karl Theodor ( 1812-1888) —
German Hegelian philosopher. —
182

Bazard, Saint Amand (1791-1832) —
French utopian socialist, headed —
together with Enfantin — the Saint-
Simonian school. — 484, 504, 507-09

Beaulieu, Claude Francois (1754-1827)
— French historian and writer, royal-
ist.— 1 78

Beck, Karl Isidor (1817-1879) — Aus-
trian poet; exponent of “true social-
ism” in the mid-forties. — 562, 567

Becker, August (1814-1871) — German
writer, utopian socialist, in the for-
ties one of the leaders of the follow-
ers of Weitling in Switzerland. —
323, 336, 531-33, 536, 537

Becker, Nicolaus (1809-1 845) — German
poet. — 57

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832) — En-
glish sociologist, theoretician of utili-
tarianism.—213, 243, 259, 409, 412-
413

Ber anger, Pierre Jean de (1780-1857) —
French poet, wrote many satirical
songs on political subjects. — 514

Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm (1784-184 6) —
German astronomer. — 393

Bettina — see Amim, Bettina ( Elisabeth )
von

Bit laud- Varenne, Jean Nicolas (1756-
1819) — French lawyer, played an ac-
tive part in the French Revolution. —
508

Blanc, Louis (181 1-1882) — French
petty-bourgeois socialist, historian. —
197, 336, 491, 493, 508

Blanqui, Jerome Adolphe (1798-1854) —
French economist. — 546

Name Index

611

Bluntschli , Johann Caspar { 1 SOS-

188 1) — Swiss lawyer and conserva-
tive politician, compiled a police
report on the followers of Weit-
iing.— 210, 217, 226, 323, 336

Bodin ( Bodinus ), Jean (1530-1596) —
French sociologist, ideologist of abso-
lutism.— 322

Boisguillebert, Pierre Le Pesant, Sieur de
(1646-1714) — French economist,
precursor of the Physiocrats, found-
er of classical bourgeois political
economy in France. — 197

Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte
de (1754-1840) — French politician
and writer, one of the ideologists of
the aristocratic and monarchist reac-
tion in the Restoration period. — 346

Boniface, Winfrid or Wynfrith (c. 680-c.
755) — ecclesiastic of the early Middle
Ages, Christian missionary. — 249

Bootes — see Semmig, Friedrich Hermann

Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704) —
French theological writer and
churchman, bishop, one of the ideol-
ogists of absolutism. — 522

Bouille, Francois Claude Amour, Marquis
de (1739-1800) — French general,
fought against the English in the An-
tilles; took part in the royalist con-
spiracy in France in 1791, counter-
revolutionary emigre. — 493

Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre (1754-
1793) — French journalist, took an
active part in the French Revolution;
member of the National Convention,
one of the leaders of the Girondists. —
198

Broglie, Victor Frangois (1718-1804) —
Marshal of France; took part in the
Seven Years’ War; in 1789 com-
manded the troops that fought
against the revolution; counter-
revolutionary emigre. — 199

Browning, G. — British statistician. —
181

Bruno, Saint— see Bauer, Bruno

Buchez, Philippe Joseph Benjamin (1796-
1865) — French politician and histo-
rian, Christian socialist. — 226. 227

Buhl, Ludwig Heinrich Franz (1814-
1880) — German writer, Young
Hegelian. — 197

Bull — see Liining, Otto

Bulwer — see Lytton, Edward George

Buonarroti, Filippo Michele ( 1761-1837)
— Italian revolutionary, utopian
communist; played a leading part in
the revolutionary movement in
France at the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries; comrade-in-arms of
Babeuf. — 508

Burger, Gottfried August (1747-1794) —
German poet. — 573

Cabarrus, Frangois, Comte de (1752-
1810) — Minister of Finance in Spain
during Joseph Bonaparte’s reign
(1809-10).— 495

C abet , Etienne (1788-1856) — French
writer, lawyer, utopian communist,
author of the utopian romance
Voyage en Icarie. — 226, 227, 461,
462, 491, 519-29, 530, 552

Caesar, Gains Julius (c. 100-44 B.C.) —
Roman general and statesman. — 444

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro (1600-1681)

— Spanish dramatist. — 450

Camoens (Camoes), Luis Vaz de (c. 1524-
1580) — Portuguese poet. — 428, 429

Capet dynasty — dynasty of French kings
(987-1328).— 146

Carnot, Lazare Nicolas (1753-1823) —
French mathematician; leading poli-
tician and general in the French
Revolution, a Jacobin; participated
in the Thermidor coup d’etat (July
1794).— 508

Carriere ( Carriere ), Moriz (1817-1895)

— German idealist philosopher, pro-
lessor of aesthetics. — 336

612

Name Index

Cartesius — see Descartes, Rene

Cato, Marcus Porcius (95-46 B.C.) — Ro-
man philosopher and statesman, re-
publican.— 508

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-
1616) — Spanish writer. — 207, 235,
238, 239, 271, 274, 283, 307, 324,
369,400, 423,443,444,450

Chamisso, Adelhert von (1781-1838) —
German poet and naturalist. — 318

Charlemagne (Charles the Great ) (c. 742-
814) — King of the Franks (768-800)
and Holy Roman Emperor (800-
814).— 85, 220, 496, 497

Charles X ( 1 757-1 836) — King of France
(1824-30).— 314, 527

Chastellux, Francois Jean, Marquis, de
(1734-1788) — French general and
writer. — 461

Cherbuliez, Antoine Elisee (1797-1869)
— Swiss economist, tried to combine
Sismondi’s theory with elements of
Ricardo’s theory. — 86

Chevalier , Michel (1 806-1 879) — French
engineer, economist and writer; in
the thirties follower of Saint-Simon,
later Free Trader. — 303, 388, 502,
509

Child, Sir Josiah (1630-1699) — English
economist (mercantilist), banker and
merchant. — 197

Churoa — see Rochau, August Ludwig von

Clavelin, G. — French historian, to-
gether with Fr. Marie Kerverseau he
wrote the Histoire de la Revolution de
1 789, et de Vetablissement d’une Consti-
tution en France.... Published under
the pseudonym of Deux amis de la
liberte. — 1 78

Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius
Clemens Alexandrinus) ,(c. 150-c. 215)
— Christian theologian. and philoso-
pher.— 142

Cobbett, William (1763-1835) — En-
glish radical politician and writer. —
464

Cobden, Richard (1804-1865) — English
politician, manufacturer, a leading
advocate of Free Trade and founder
of the Anti-Corn Law League. — 445

Comte, Francois Charles Louis (1782-
1837) — French liberal writer and
economist. — 308

Conde, Louis Henri Joseph de Bourbon,
Prince de (1756-1830) — French
prince; emigrated at the beginning
of the French Revolution and fought
in the emigre army against the
French Republic. In 1825 he recei-
ved compensation for estates of his
which had been confiscated during
the Revolution. — 527

Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de
Caritat, Marquis de (1743-1794) —
French sociologist, Enlightener;
played an active part in the French
Revolution, Girondist. — 526, 527

Confucius (K’ung Fu-tse) (551-479 B.C.)
— Chinese philosopher. — 521

Constant de Rebecque, Henri Benjamin
(1767-1830) — French liberal politi-
cian and writer. — 347

Cooper, Thomas (1759-1840) — Ameri-
can economist and politician. — 392,
489

Courier de Mere, Paul Louis (1772-1825)
— French philologist and writer,
democrat. — 464

Crab — see Helmich, Julius

Croesus — King of Lydia (c. 560-546
B.C.).— 353

Ddhnhardt, Marie Wilhelmine (1818-
1902) — wife of Max Stirner, mem-
ber of “The Free”, a Young-
Hegelian circle in Berlin. — 179, 191,
205, 283, 300, 364, 369, 398, 401,
442

Dalton, John (1766-1844) — English
chemist and physicist, set forth the
atomic theory of chemical composi-
tion.— 141

Name Index

613

Danton, Georges Jacques (1759-1794) —
leader of the Right wing of the
Jacobins during the French Revolu-
tion.— 338

Decazes et de Glucksberg Elie, Due (1780-
1860) — French statesman of the
Restoration period, entrepreneur,
mine-owner. — 544

Delavigne, Germain (1790-1868) —

French playwright. — 468

Democritus of Abdera (c. 460 -c. 370
B.C.) — Greek philosopher, one of
the founders of the atomistic
theory. — 141

Descartes, Rene (in Latin: Renatus Carte-
sius) ( 1 596- 1 650) — French philoso-
pher, mathematician and scientist. —
172

Desmoulins, Lucie Simplice Camille Be-
noist (1760-1794) — French writer;
played an active part in the French
Revolution, Right-wing Jacobin. —
485

Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude,
Comte de (1754-1836) — French econ-
omist, philosopher; advocate of con-
stitutional monarchy. — 228, 231

Deux amis de la liberte — see Clavelin, G.
and Kerverseau, Fr. Marie

Dezamy, Theodore (1803-1850) —
French writer, revolutionary utopian
communist. — 526

Diogenes Laertius (3rd century A.D.) —
Greek historian of philosophy,
compiled a large work on the ancient
philosophers. — 139-40

Dronke, Ernst (1822-1891) — German
writer, at first a “true socialist”, then
follower of Marx and Engels. —
570-72

Duchatel, Charles Marie Tanneguy, Comte
(1803-1867) — French statesman.
Minister of Trade (1834-36) and
Minister of the Interior (1839, 1840-
February 1848), Malthusian. — 359

Dumas, Alexandre ( Dumas pere) (1803-
1870) — French writer. — 571

Dunoyer, Barthelemy Charles Pierre Joseph
(1786-1862) — French economist
and politician. — 63, 445

Dupin, Andre Marie Jacques (1783-1865)
— French lawyer and politician,
Orleanist. — 507

Duvergier de Hauranne, Prosper (1798-
1881) — French liberal politician and
writer. — 163

Eck, Karl Gottlieb (b. 1823) — German
artisan, poet, “true socialist”. — 575

Eden, Sir Frederick Morton (1766-1809)
— English economist and historian,
disciple of Adam Smith. — 220

Edmonds, Thomas Rowe (1803-1889) —

English economist; utopian socialist
who drew socialist conclusions from
Ricardo’s theory.— 461

Edward VI (1537-1553)— King of
England (1547-53).— 204

Eichhom, Johann Albrecht Friedrich
(1779-1856) — Prussian statesman,
Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs,
Education and Medicine (1840-
48).— 367

Encke, Johann Franz (1791-1865) —
German astronomer. — 393

Enfantin, Barthelemy Prosper (also Pere
Enfantin, Father Enfantin ) (1796-
1864) — French utopian socialist, a
disciple of Saint-Simon; headed —
together with Bazard — the Saint-
Simonian school. — 484, 507, 508

Engels, Frederick (1820-1895). — 6, 8,
11, 15, 17, 19, 24, 46, 78, 86, 90,
113-14, 540, 550, 580

Epicurus (c. 341-c. 270 B.C.) — Greek
atomistic philosopher. — 141-42

Ewald, Johann Ludwig (1747-1822) —
German theologian and moralist. —
122

Ewerbeck, August Hermann (1816-1 860)
— German physician and writer,

614

Name Index

leader of the Paris communities of
the League of the Just. — 577

Fatouville, Nolant de (d. 1715) — French
playwright. — 430

Faucher, Julius (Jules) (1820-1878) —
German writer, Young Hegelian. —
110, 113

Fauchet, Claude (1744-1793) — French
bishop, played an active part in the
French Revolution, sided with the
Girondists. — 198

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804-1872)
— German philosopher. — 3-13, 16,
19-23, 27-30, 38-41, 56-59, 78, 94,
95, 99-107, 114-17, 130, 134, 136,
138, 146, 160, 192, 233-37, 253, 257,
284, 336, 366, 380, 444, 446, 448,
449, 456, 467, 486, 490, 491, 512,
529, 572

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-181 4) — —
German philosopher. — 98, 106

Fievee, Joseph (1767-1839) — French
conservative writer and journalist. —
346

Fourier, Frangois Marie Charles (1772-
1837) — French utopian socialist. —
206, 256, 415, 461, 462, 481, 484.
492, 510, 511-13, 518, 519, 535. 543,
551

Francis 1(1494-1547) — King of France
(1515-47).— 274, 335

Francke, August Hermann (1663-1727)
— German theologian and teacher,
founder of schools, an orphanage,
etc., in HalJe. — 249

Frederick William IV (1795-1861) —
King of Prussia (1840-61) — 3.30.
339" 365. 54 1

Freiligrath , Ferdinand (1810-1876) —
German poet; he began as a roman-
tic poet, later wrote revolutionary
poems. — 560, 569, 570, 572

Fulchiron, Jean Claude (1774-1859) —
French capitalist and conservative
politician. — 544

Gellert, Christian Furchtegott (1715-
1 769) - — German fabulist. — 382

George, Saint — see Kuhlmann, Georg

Gerhard, Wilhelm Christoph Leonard
(1780-1858) — German poet and
translator. — 569

Gessner, Salomon (1730-1788) — Swiss
poet and painter. — 568

Godwin, William (1756-1836) — En-
glish writer and philosopher, one of
the founders of anarchism. — 402,
412

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-
1832) — German poet. — 40, 119,

330, 414, 434, 550, 554, 556, 560,
561, 563

Greaves, James Pierrepont (1777-1842) —
English educationist, drew up pro-
jects for the organisation of the work
of agricultural labourers. — 461

Gregory VII ( Hildebrand) (c. 1020-1085)
— Pope (1073-85).— 177

Grosvenor, Richard, Marquis of West-
minster (1795-1869) — big English
landowner. — 544

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645) — Dutch
scientist, lawyer, one of the founders
of the natural law theory. — 522

Griin, Karl (1817-1887) — German
writer, in the mid-forties a “true
socialist”.— 484-531, 540, 551

Guizot, Frangois Pierre Guillaume (1787-
1874) — French historian and states-
man; directed the home and foreign
policy of France from 1840 until the
February revolution of 1848. — 146,
220, 311, 336, 399, 489, 520, 545,
546

Gutzkow, Karl Ferdinand (181 1-1878} —
German writer, member of the
Young Germany literary group. —
549, 552

Halm, Friedrich (pseudonym of Elegius
Franz Joseph, Reichsfreiherr von

Name Index

615

Miinch-Bellinghausen) (1806-1871) —
Austrian poet and playwright. — 302

Hampden, John (1594-1643) — English
statesman, one of the leaders of the
parliamentary opposition to the king
during the English revolution of the
seventeenth century. — 197

Hannibal ( c . 247-183 B.C.) — Cartha-
ginian general. — 163

Harney, George Julian (1817-1897) —
one of the leaders of the Left wing of
the Chartist movement. — 461

Hartmann, Moritz (1821-1872) — Aus-
trian writer; in the mid-forties a
“true socialist”. — 562

Hatzfeld, Sophie, Countess (1805-1881)
— German aristocrat who broke with
her husband, later friend and sup-
porter of Lassalle. — 573

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ( 1 770-
1831) — German philosopher. — 1 6,
24, 29, 41, 55, 61-62. 99-102, 105,
106, 112-15, 121, 129-30, 134, 137,
138, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 153-54,
157-58, 159, 164, 166, 168-76, 177,
181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 190, 192,
193, 197, 203, 208, 234, 236-, 241,
254, 264, 266, 269, 272, 277, 278,
305, 306, 318, 323, 326, 328, 336,
337, 348, 353, 408, 410, 434, 456.
458, 461, 473, 480, 484, 489, 491,
530

Heme, Heinrich (1797-1856) — Ger-
man revolutionary poet. — 117, 333,
406, 460, 467, 470, 485, 510, 574

Heinrich LXXll (1797-1853) — ruler
of the tiny German principality of
Reu ss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf (1822-
48).— 271

Helmich, Julius — Westphalian publish-
er and bookseller, ‘ true socialist" —
541

Helvetius, Claude A dr.ien (1715-1771) —
French philosopher, atheist, En-
lightener.— 243, 409, 410, 41 1

Henri, Joseph (born c. 1795) — French
merchant; on July 29, 1846, he made

an unsuccessful attempt on the life of
Louis Philippe and was condemned
to penal servitude for life. — 546

Henry VIII (1491-1547) — King of

England (1509-47).— 69

Heraclitus (c. 540-c. 480 B.C.) — Greek
philosopher. — 1 39

Herschel, Sir John Frederick William
(1792-1871) — English astronomer.
— 393

Herwegh, Georg Friedrich (1817-1875 ) —
German poet. — 466, 561

Hess, Moses (1812-1875) — German
radical writer, one of the leaders of
the “true socialists” in the mid-
forties.—96, 114, 115, 117, 209,
236, 260, 336, 339, 415, 416, 446,
459, 466-68, 486, 491-93, 513

Hiller— a German who, driven to
desperation caused by poverty, killed
his five children in lune 1845. — 575,
579

Hinrichs, Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm
(1794-1861) — German professor of
philosophy. Right-wing Hegelian. —
16,113,115,336

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679) — English
philosopher. — 321, 328, 381, 409,
41 1, 412, 473, 522

Hobson, Joshua — English journalist.
Chartist.— 212, 461

Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Hein-
rich (1798-1874) — German poet and
philologist. — 185, 561

Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich, Baron d’
(1 723-1 789) — French philosopher,
atheist. Enlightener.— 409-1 2, 461

Hoiyoake, George Jacob (1817-1906) —
English writer; played a prominent
part in the cooperative movement,
in the thirties and forties Owenite
and Chartist. — 461

Horace, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8
B.C.) — Roman poet. — 140, 544

Hume, David (1711-1776) — Scottish
philosopher, historian and econo-
mist.—172, 412

616

Name Index

Ibn ( Ebn ) Sina, Abu Ali (Latinised form:
Avicenna ) (c. 980-1037) — medieval
philosopher, physician and poet;
Tajik by birth. — 163

Innocent III (c. 1161-1216) — Pope

(1198-1216).— 177

Jay, Antoine (1770-1854) — French
writer. — 5 1 9

Jean Paul (pseudonym of Johann Paul
Friedrich Richter) (1763-1825) — Ger-
man writer. — 138, 195

Joseph II (1741-1790) — Holy Roman
Emperor (1765-90).— 562

Jussieu, Antoine Laurent de (1748-1836)
— French botanist. — 461

Juvenal, Decimus Junius (born in the 60s
— died after 127) — Roman satirical
poet.— 172, 225

Kant, Immanuel ( 1 724-1804) — German
philosopher. — 181, 193, 195, 196,
491

Kats, Jacob (1804-1886) — Belgian
worker, writer, played an active part
in the working-class movement, was
influenced by utopian socialism. —
490-91

Kaulbach, Wilhelm von (1805-1874) —
German painter. — 94

Kerverseau, Fr. Marie — French histo-
rian, together with G. Clavelin he
wrote the Histoire de la Revolution de
1789, et de Vetablissement d’une Consti-
tution en France.... Published under
the pseudonym of Deux amis de la
liberte. — 1 78

Kett (Ket), Robert (executed in 1549) —
leader of the peasant rising in En-
gland in 1549. — 204

Kind, Friedrich ( 1768- 1843) — German
poet and playwright. — 102, 149, 398

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-1803)
— German poet. — 285, 312

Kohler, Ludwig (1819-1862) — German
writer; in the mid-forties a “true
socialist”. — 574

Komer, Karl Theodor (1791-1813) —
German romantic poet and drama-
tist; was killed in the war of lib-
eration against Napoleon. — 249

Konrad von Wurzburg (d. 1287) — Ger-
man poet. — 449

Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von
(1761-1819) — German writer and
journalist, extreme monarchist. —
572

Kriege, Hermann (1820-1850) — Ger-
man journalist, “true socialist”;
founder and editor of the New York
newspaper Der Volks-Tribun. — 541,
543

Krummacher, Friedrich Wilhelm (1796-
1868) — German clergyman. Calvin-
ist, leader of the pietists in Wupper-
tal.—236

Kuhlmann, Georg ( b. 1812) — secretin-
former in the service of the Austrian
Government; in the forties preached
the ideas of “true socialism” among
the German artisans, follow-
ers of Weitling in Switzerland; used
religious phraseology and claimed to
be a prophet.— 377, 392, 531-38

Lafayette (La Fayette), Marie Joseph Paul,
Marquis de (1757- 1834) — prominent
figure in the French Revolution, one
of the leaders of the moderate consti-
tutionalists (Feuillants); fled to Hol-
land in 1793; subsequently took part
in the July Revolution of 1830. — 198

Lafontaine, August Heinrich (1758-1831)
— German writer, author of many
sentimental novels. — 568

Name Index

617

Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de
( 1 790-1869) — French poet, historian
and politician; in the forties a liberal,
one of the leaders of the moderate
republicans. — 520

Lamennais (La Mennais), Felicite Robert
de (1782-1854) — French abbot,
writer, one of the ideologists of
Christian socialism. — 534, 535

Lancizolle, Karl Wilhelm (1796-1871) —
German jurist, historian of law . — 346

Langbein, August Friedrich Ernst (1757-
1835) — German poet. — 211

La Vauguyon, Paul Francois, Due de
(1746-1828) — French diplomat, am-
bassador in Holland and Spain. — 494

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
— German philosopher and mathe-
matician.—98, 179,442

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) — Itali-
an painter, sculptor, scientist, archi-
tect and engineer. — 393

Lerminier, Jean Louis Eugene (1803-
1857) — French lawyer and writer. —
489

Leroux, Pierre (1797-1871) — French
writer; utopian socialist, representa-
tive of Christian socialism. — 231

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781)
— German dramatist, critic and phi-
losopher.— 336, 491

Levasseur de la Sarthe, Rene (1747-1834)
— French physician; leading figure in
the French Revolution, member of
the Convention, Jacobin; author of
memoirs on the French Revolu-
tion.—178, 508

Licinius (Gains Licinius Calvus Stolo)
(4th cent. B.C.) — Roman statesman.
— 33

Linguet, Simon Nicolas Henri (1736-
1 704) — French lawyer, writer, histo-
rian and economist, critic of the
Physiocrats. — 198

Linne, Carl von( 1707-1778) — Swedish
botanist, devised a system for the clas-

sification of plants and animals. —
461

Lion — see Kriege, Hermann

Lloyd, Samuel Jones, Baron Overstone
(1796-1883) — British banker and
economist, follower of Ricardo. —
544

Locke, John (1632-1704) — English phi-
losopher.—409, 411-12, 522

Louis XIV (1638-1715) — King of
France (1643-1715).— 496

Louis XVI (1754-1793) — King of
France (1774-92); guillotined. — 146,
514, 525

Louis XVIII (1755-1824) — King of
France (1814-15 and 1815-24).— 527

Louis Philippe I (1773-1 850) — Duke of
Orleans, King of the French (1830-
48).— 489

Lourdoueix, Jacques Honore Lelarge,
Baron de (1787-1860) — French writ-
er, royalist, editor of the Gazette de
France. — 346

Louvet de Couvray, Jean Baptiste (1760-
1797) — French writer, prominent
figure in the French Revolution,
Girondist. — 1 78

Lucian (c. 120-c. 180) — Greek satirical
writer. — 143, 187

Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (c. 99-
c. 55 B.C.) — Roman philosopher
and poet. — 139, 142

Ludwig I (1786-1868) — King of Ba-
varia (1825-48), wrote pretentious
and pompous poems.— 577

Liming, Otto (1818-1868) — German
physician and writer, in the mid-
forties a “true socialist”, publisher of
the Weser-Dampfboot (1844) and the
Westphalische Dampfboot (1845-48)
-540-43, 545, 546, 548, 549, 556

Luther, Martin (1483-1546) — German
theologian and writer, prominent
figure of the Reformation, founder

618

Name Index

of Protestantism (Lutheranism) in
Germany.— 142, 147, 171, 358, 504

Lycurgus — legendary Spartan law-
giver, who is supposed to have lived
in the ninth century B.C. — 520

Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton,
Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) — English
writer and politician. — 570

Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de ( 1 709- 1 785) —
French sociologist, advocate of uto-
pian egalitarian communism. — 198,
523

McCulloch , John Ramsay (1789-1864) —
British economist who vulgarised
Ricardo’s theory. — 366

Machiavelli, Niccold (1469-1527) — Ital-
ian statesman, historian and writer.
— 321

Maistre, Joseph Marie, Comte de (1753-
1821) — French writer, monarchist,
an ideologist of aristocratic and
clerical reaction. — 346

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834) —
English clergyman and economist,
author of a theory of population. —
359

Marat, Jean Paul (1743-1793) — out-
standing figure in the French Revo-
lution, one of the leaders of the Jaco-
bins.— 198

Marx, Karl (1818-1883) — 3, 6, 15-19,
24, 38, 41, 42, 43-48, 49-52, 55, 60,
62, 70, 76-77, 82, 88, 91, 92, 111-15,
218, 248, 251, 252

Matthdi, Rudolph — German writer,

“true socialist”. — 470-83

Mauguin, Francois (1785-1854) —
French lawyer and politician; one of
the leaders of the liberal dynastic
opposition (until 1848). — 507

Max, Saint — see Stimer, Max

Mayer, Charles Joseph (1751-c. 1825) —
French writer. — 336

Meissner, Alfred (1822-1 885) — German
democratic writer; in the mid-forties
a “true socialist”, subsequently a
liberal. — 560-68

Mercier, Louis Sebastien (1740-1814) —
French writer of the Enlightenment;
joined the Girondists during the
French Revolution. — 198

Mettemich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Fiirst
von (1773-1859) — Austrian states-
man and diplomat. Minister of
Foreign Affairs (1809-21) and Chan-
cellor (1821-48), one of the organis-
ers of the Holy Alliance. — 314

Meyer, Julius (d. 1867) — Westphalian
businessman and writer; “true so-
cialist” in the mid-forties. — 541

Meyerbeer, Giacomo (Jacob Liebmann
Beer) (1791-1864) — composer, con-
ductor and pianist, one of the cre-
ators of the French grand opera. —
468

Michelet, Karl Ludwig (1801-1893) —
German Hegelian philosopher, pro-
fessor at Berlin University. — 121,
181, 182

Mill, James (1773-1836) — Scottish phi-
losopher (follower of Bentham) tnd
economist, adherent of Ricardo’s
theory. — 412

Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel Victor Riqueti,
Comte de (1749-1791) — prominent
figure in the French Revolution, was
in favour of a constitutional monar-
chy.— 526

Mohammed Ali (1769-1849) — Viceroy
of Egypt (1805-49); introduced a
series of progressive reforms. — 163

Monteil, Amans Alexis (1769-1850) —
French historian. — 220, 343, 548

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat,
Baron de la Brede et de (1689-1755) —
French philosopher and sociologist,
Enlightener.— 286, 520, 523

Montgaillard, Guillaume Honore Roques
(1772-1825) — French abbot, histo-
rian, royalist. — 178

Montjoie, Felix Christophe Louis (1746-
1816) — French royalist writer. — 1 7 8

Name Index

619

More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535) — En-
glish statesman. Lord Chancellor
(1529-32), humanist writer, one of
the earliest utopian communists,
author of Utopia. — 461

Morelly (18th cent.) — French advocate
of utopian egalitarian communism. —
528

Morgan, John M inter (1782-1854) —
English writer, follower of Owen. —
461

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791)
— Austrian composer. — 392, 485,
559

Mundt, Theodor (1808-1 861) — German
writer, belonged to the Young Ger-
many literary movement; professor
of literature and history at the uni-
versities of Breslau and Berlin. —
484

Napoleon I (Bonaparte) (1769-1821) —
Emperor of the French (1804-14 and
1815).— 51, 136, 137, 146, 163, 195,
277, 353, 362, 398, 445, 526, 553

Nauwerck (Nauwerk), Karl Ludwig
Theodor (1810-1891) — German writ-
er, member of “The Free”, a Young-
Hegelian circle in Berlin.— 110, 336

Neuhaus, Gtistav Reinhardt (1823-1892)
— German poet, a “true socialist” in
the mid-forties. — 576

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727) — En-
glish physicist, astronomer and
mathematician. — 72, 500

Nougaret , Pierre Jean Baptiste (1724-
1823) — French writer and histo-
rian.— 1 78

O’Connell, Daniel (1775-1847) — Irish
lawyer and politician, leader of the
liberal wing of the Irish national lib-
eration movement. — 249, 288, 529

Oelckers, Hermann Theodor (1816-1869)
— German democratic writer. — 456
Opitz, Theodor — German writer,

Young Hegelian. — 549, 575
Orion — see Meissner, Alfred
Otto I ( Otto the Child) (1815-1867) —
Prince of Bavaria and from 1832 to
1862 King of Greece. — 353

Otto (-Peters) , Luise (1819-1 895) — Ger-
man writer; in the mid-forties a
“true socialist”. — 560

Owen, Robert (1771-1858) — English
utopian socialist. — 7, 216, 392, 461

Pamy, Evariste Desire de Forges, Vicomte
de (1753-1814) — French poet.— 483

Peltier, Jean Gabriel ( 1 765- 1825) - —
French royalist writer. — 178

Pereire, Isaac (1806-1880) — French
small broker, later banker; follower
of Saint-Simon; Bonapartist, author
of works on credit. — 232

Pericles (c. 490-429 B.C.) — Athenian
statesman, leader of the democratic
party. — 138

Perseus — see Schnake, Friedrich

Persiani, Fanny (1812-1867) — Italian
singer. — 440

Petty, Sir William (1623-1687) — En-
glish economist and statistician,
founder of the classical school of
bourgeois political economy in Brit-
ain.—197

Pfeffel, Gottlieb Konrad (1736-1809) —
German writer of fables, poet and
pedagogue. — 299

Pfister, Johann Christian (1772-1835) —
German churchman and historian. —
239

Philippson, Ludwig (181 1-1889) — rabbi
in Magdeburg, fought to secure
equality for the Jews. — 1 14

Pilate, Pontius (died c. 37) — Roman
procurator of Judaea (26-36); ac-

620

Name Index

cording to Christian tradition, or-
dered the crucification of Jesus. —
138, 143

Pinto, Isaac (1715-1787) — Dutch econ-
omist and stockjobber. — 71, 361

Plato (c. 427-c. 347 B.C.) — Greek
philosopher. — 143, 173

Plutarch (c. 46-c. 125) — Greek moralist
writer and philosopher. — 142

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-1865) —
French writer, economist and sociolo-
gist, one of the founders of anar-
chism.—179, 225, 336, 353, 364,
380, 423, 491-93, 511, 518, 529-30,
535

Prutz, Robert Eduard (1816-1 872)

German poet and historian of litera-
ture.— 561

Ptolemy — name of a dynasty of Egyp-
tian kings (305-30 B.C.).— 163

Pufendorf, Samuel, Freiherr von (1632-
1694) — German scholar, jurist and
historian, expounded a theory of
natural law. — 522, 523

Piittmann, Hermann (1811-1894) —
German radical poet and journalist,
a “true socialist” in the mid-for-
ties.—553-56, 558, 573-74, 577-80

Pythagoras (c. 571-497 B.C.) — Greek
mathematician and philosopher. —

520

Rabelais, Francois (c. 1494-1553) —

French humanist writer. — 191

Ram — see Weydemeyer, Joseph

Ranke, Leopold von (1795-1886) — Ger-
man historian, professor at Berlin
University. — 301

Raphael ( Raffaello Santi) (1483-1520) —
Italian painter. — 390, 392-93

Regnier d’Estourbet, Hippolyte (pseud-
onym M. R.) (1804-1832) — French
writer and historian. — 178

Reichardt, Carl Ernst — a Berlin book-
binder, follower of Bruno Bauer,

contributed to the Allgemeine Litera-
tur-Zeitung .— 1 10, 220, 232

Reinhardt, Richard ( 1 829- 1 898) — Ger-
man poet, emigrated to Paris,

Heine’s secretary. — 577

Rempel, Rudolf (18 15- 1868) — German
entrepreneur, in the mid-forties a
“true socialist”. — 541

Reybaud, Marie Roch Louis (1799-1879)

— French writer and economist, lib-
eral.—493-95, 496, 498, 500, 503-
07, 509, 519, 530

Ricardo, David (1772-1823) — English
economist. — 403

Robespierre, Maximilien Frangois Marie
Isidore de (1758-1794) — leading fig-
ure in the French Revolution, lead-
er of the Jacobins; head of the rev-
olutionary government (1793-94). —
177-79, 243, 249, 338, 403, 485

Rochau, August Ludwig von (pseudonym
Churoa) (1810-1873) — German lib-
eral writer and historian. — 510

Rochow, Friedrich Eberhard von (1734-
1805) — German teacher, author of
moralising books for young people.

— 568

Rodrigues, Benjamin Olinde ( 1794-1851)
— French financier, disciple of Saint-
Simon, one of the founders and
leaders of the Saint-Simonian
school.— 493, 500

Rohmer, Friedrich (1814-1856) — Ger-
man philosopher. — 536

Roland de la Platiere, Jeanne Marie ou
Manon Phlipon (1754-1793) —

French writer, played an active part
in the French Revolution, Girond-
ist.—178

Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich (1805-
1879) — German philosopher and
historian of literature, follower of
Hegel.— 508

Rothschild, James ( 1 792-1868) — head of
the Rothschild banking house in
Paris.— 353, 544

Name Index

621

Rotted i, Karl Wenzeslaus Rodecker von
(1775-1 840) — German historian and
liberal politician. — 353

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-1778) —
French philosopher and writer of the
Enlightenment. — 80, 199, 334, 402,
523, 524

Ruge, Arnold (1802-1880) — German
radical writer and philosopher,
Young Hegelian. — 96, 236, 247

Rum ford — see Thompson, Benjamin

Rutenberg, Adolf (1808-1869) — Ger-
man writer, Young Hegelian. — 336

Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Leon de ( 1 767-
1794) — one of the leaders of the
Jacobins in the French Revolution. —
177-79, 243, 338, 403

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy,
Comte de (1760-1825) — French uto-
pian socialist. — 464, 474-75, 484,
491, 493-508

Sancho, Saint — see Stimer, Max

Sand, George (pseudonym of Amandine
Lucie Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dude-
vant) (1804-1876) — French writer. —
179

Sarran (Sarrans), Jean Raimond Pascal
(1780-1844) — French royalist writ-
er.— 346

Sass, Friedrich (1819-1851) — German
writer, “true socialist”. — 573

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
(1775-1854) — German philosopher.
— 134,491

Scherr, Johannes (1817-1 886) — German
liberal historian and writer. — 575

Sch ikaneder, Emanuel (1751-1812) —
Austrian actor, producer and play-
wright.— 485

Schiller, Friedrich von (1759-1805) —
German poet, historian and philoso-
pher.— 105, 1 13, 489, 522, 523, 544,
553, 559, 561, 574

Schirges, Georg Gottlieb (1811-1879) —
German writer; in the mid-forties a
“true socialist”. — 543, 544

Schlegel, August Wilhelm von
(1767-1845) — German romantic
poet, translator, critic and historian
of literature. — 406

Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph (1776-
1861) — German historian, demo-
crat.— 336

Schlussel, G. — editor and publisher of
the journal Veilchen (1846-47), “true
socialist”. — 559

Schmidt, Johann Caspar. — see Stimer,
Max

Schnake, Friedrich — Ge r m an j ou rn ali st ;
in the mid-forties a “true socialist”. —
542, 549, 550-52, 555, 550

Schweitzer, Joseph — German poet, “true
socialist”. — 575, 576

Schwerdtlein, Rudolf — German poet,
“true socialist”. — 578

Scribe, Eugene (1791-1861) — French
playwright. — 468

Semmig, Friedrich Hermann (1820-
1897) — German writer, in the mid-
forties a “true socialist”. — 458, 556-
61, 575

Senior, Nassau William (1790-1864) —
English economist, vulgarised
Ricardo’s theory. — 360

Shakespeare, William ( 1 564- 1616) — En-
glish dramatist and poet. — 106, 230,
231, 326, 561

Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph (1748-1836) —
French abbot, played an active part
in the French Revolution. — 520, 526

Sigismund I ( c . 1361-1437) — Holy Ro-
man Emperor (1410-37). — 274

Sismondi, Jean Charles Leonard Simonde
de (1773-1842) — Swiss economist,
representative of economic romanti-
cism.—86, 202, 509

Smith, Adam (1723-1790) — Scottish
economist. — 72, 392, 525

622

Name Index

Socrates (c. 469-c. 399 B.C.) — Greek
philosopher. — 138, 147, 154

Sophocles (c. 497-c. 406 B.C.) — Greek
dramatist. — 137

Southwell, Charles (1814-1860) — En-
glish utopian socialist, follower of
Owen. — 461

Spartacus (d. 71 B.C.) — leader of the
greatest slave revolt in ancient Rome
(73-71 B.C.).— 220

Spence, Thomas (1750-1814) — English
utopian socialist, advocated the abo-
lition of private ownership of land
and the establishment of a kind of
agrarian socialism. — 46 1

Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedict) de (1632-
1677) — Dutch philosopher. — 98,

106, 178, 179, 321

Stehely — owner of a cafe in Berlin;
members of “The Free” used to
meet there in the forties. — 324

Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Baron
vom vnd zum (1757-1 831) — Prussian
statesman, held high government of-
fice between 1804 and 1808, helped
to introduce moderate reforms. —
352

Stein, Lorenz von (1815-1890) — Ger-
man lawyer and historian, author of
works on the socialist movement, sup-
porter of a “social monarchy”. — 210,
456, 484, 493-504, 506-1 1,528, 530,
535

Steinmann, Friedrich Arnold (1801-
1875) — German writer. — 549, 550

Stimer, Max (pseudonym of Johann Cas-
par Schmidt) (1806-1856) — German
philosopher, Young Hegelian, one of
the ideologists of individualism and
anarchism.— 19-23, 29, 30.54, 55-59,
62, 65, 76, 83, 95, 97, 99-100, 102,
106, 107, 114-21, 123, 124, 126, 129,
133, 134, 136-330, 332-43, 345-452,
455. 463, 467, 572

Stratton, Charles Sherwood (1838-
1883) — American dwarf who ap-
peared in circus shows under the

name of “General Tom Thumb”. —
116

Strauss, David Friedrich (1808-1874) —
German philosopher and writer,
Young Hegelian. — 27, 29, 175

Sue, Eugene (1804-1857) — French
writer, author of sentimental novels
on social themes. — 571

Szeliga — see Zychlinski, Franz Zychlin
von

Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice de
(1754-1838) — French diplomat and
statesman; Bishop of Autun (1788-
91); Minister of Foreign Affairs
(1797-99, 1799-1807 and 1814-15),
represented France at the Congress
of Vienna (1814-15).— 198-99

Tertullian ( Quintus Septimius Florens
Tertullianus) (c. 150-c. 222) — Chris-
tian theologian and writer. — 163

Teste, Charles (d. 1848) — French uto-
pian communist, follower of Babeuf,
took part in the republican move-
ment during the July monarchy. —
508

Themistocles (c. 525-c. 460 B.C.) —
Athenian statesman and general at
the time of the Persian wars. — 353

Thiers, Louis Adolphe (1797-1877) —
French historian and statesman.
Prime Minister (1836-40), after 1848
leader of the Orleanists, organised
the suppression of the Paris Com-
mune; President of the Republic
(1871-73).— 546, 547

Thompson, Benjamin, Count Rumford
(1753-1814) — English officer of
American descent; was for a time in
the service of the Bavarian govern-
ment; organised workhouses for beg-
gars and compiled recipes for pau-
pers’ broths made up of cheap substi-
tutes.—235, 272

Name Index

623

Thomposon, William (c. 1785-1833) —
Irish economist, arrived at socialist
conclusions on the basis of Ricardo’s
theory; follower of Owen— 461

Timon of Phlius (c. 320-c. 230 B.C.) —
Greek sceptic philosopher. — 138,
143

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (1477-1576) —
Italian painter of the Venetian
school. — 393

Tom Thumb — see Stratton, Charles
Sherwood

Trajan ( Marcus Ulpius Nerva Trajanus)
(c. 53-117) — Roman Emperor (98-
117).— 458

Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, Baron de
VAulne (1727-1781) — French econo-
mist and statesman; Physiocrat;
Controller-General of Finance
(1774-76).— 514, 523-25

Twins — see Rempel, Rudolf and Meyer,
Julius

Tyler, Wat(d. 1381) — leader of the En-
glish peasant revolt of 1381. — 204

Tyrtaeus (7th cent. B.C.) — Greek
poet. — 485

Ursa Major — see Piittmann, Hermann

Venedey, Jakob (1805-1871) — German
radical writer and politician; became
a liberal after the revolution of
1848.-57

Vemet, Jean Horace (1789-1863) —
French painter of battle scenes. —
393

Victoria (1819-1901) — Queen of Great
Britain and Ireland (1837-1901). —
542

Villegardelle, Francois (1810-1856) —
French writer, follower of Fourier,
later utopian communist. — 528

Vincke, Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm
Philipp, Freiherr von (1774-1844) —
Prussian statesman. — 352

Virgil ( Vergil ) ( Publius Vergilius Maro)
(70-19 B.C.) — Roman poet. — 423

Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet (1694-
1778) — French philosopher, writer
and historian of the Enlighten-
ment.— 525

Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich ( 1 773-
1798) — German romantic writer. —
471

Wade, John ( 1 788-1875) — English writ-
er, economist and historian. — 202

Wash ington, George (1732-1799) —

American statesman and general,
Commander-in-Chief of the North-
American forces during the Ameri-
can War of Independence (1775-83);
first President of the U.S.A. (1789-
97). — 493

Watts, John (1818-1887)— English uto-
pian socialist, follower of Owen. —
212, 461

Weber, Carl Maria von (1786-1826) —
German composer. — 102, 149, 398

Weerth, Georg (1822-1856) — German
proletarian poet and journalist; a
friend of Marx and Engels. — 574

Weitling, Wilhelm Christian ( 1 808- 1871)
— leader of the German working-
class movement in its early period,
one of the theoreticians of utopian
egalitarian communism; a tailor by
trade. — 206, 226, 461

Westminster — see Grosvenor, Richard

Weydemeyer, Joseph (1818-1866) — lead-
er of the German and American
working-class movements; in 1846-
47 he was under the influence of the
“true socialists’’, subsequently he be-
came a comrade-in-arms of Marx and
Engels; later one of the first to propa-
gate Marxism in the U.S.A. — 54 1 -46.
548, 556

624

Name Index

Wigand, Otto (1795-1870) — German
publisher and bookseller, owner of a
firm in Leipzig which published
works by radical writers. — 117

Woeniger, August Theodor — German
writer.— 220, 232

Zeno (c. 430-491) — Byzantine Em-
peror (474-91).— 204

Zeno of Citium (c. 336-264 B.C.) —
Greek philosopher, founder of the
Stoic school. — 140

Zychlinski, Franz Zychlin von (1816-
1900) — Prussian officer, Young He-
gelian; contributed to Bruno Bauer’s
periodicals under the pseudonym of
Szeiiga.— 117,' 121, 122, 123, 149,
150-53, 154-55, 160, 170, 190-92,
224, 238, 246, 269-71, 277, 285,
295, 316, 343, 344, 345, 366, 369,
386, 397, 398, 447, 448-49.

INDEX OF LITERARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL NAMES

Abigail (Bib.) — the wife of Nabal, a
wealthy owner of herds of sheep. —
158

Abraham (Bib.). — 201

Adam (Bib.).— 1 10, 515

Amadis of Gaul — hero of a medieval
Spanish romance of chivalry. — 342

Amon (Bib.) — a king of Judah. — 108

Antigone — in Greek legend, daughter
of Oedipus, King of Thebes; heroine
of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. —
137

Baal — chief deity of the Phoenicians.
— 108,535

Balaam (Bib.) — a prophet. — 103

Ben Himmon (Bib.) — 108

Cain (Bib.) — a son of Adam and Eve;
murderer of Abel, his brother. — 103

Charon (Gr. Myth.) — ferryman who
conveyed the souls of the dead across
the river Styx. — 102

Christ — see Jesus Christ

Clavileho — a toy -horse in Cervantes’
Don Quixote. — 369, 388

Crispinus — a character from Juvenal’s
satire. — 172, 225

Danaides (Gr. Myth.) — the daughters
of King Danaus who murdered their
husbands at their father’s command;

they were condemned by the gods
eternallv to fill bottomless vessels
with water. — 157

Dioscuri (Gr. Myth.) — Castor and
Pollux, the twin sons of Zeus, by
whom they were turned into the
constellation Gemini (the Twins); as
such they were considered to be the
patrons of seamen. — 234

Don Quixote de la Mancha — hero of
Cervantes’ Don Quixote; see Zych-
linski ( Szeiiga )

Dottore Graziano — a personage in the
Italian Commedia dell’arte, pseudo-
scholar and pedant; see Ruge, Arnold

Dulcinea del Toboso — a character in
Cervantes’ Don Quixote; see Dahn-
hardt, Marie Wilhelmine

Eckart — a hero of German medieval
legends, the ’prototype of a staunch
friend and trustworthy guardian. —
149

Emanuel ■ — a character in Jean Paul’s
novel Hesperus oder 45 Hundspost-
tage. — 138

Eamenides (Gr. Myth.) — goddesses of
revenge. — 1 22

Eve (Bib.).— 1 10

Ezekiel (Bib.) — a prophet, author of
the Book of Ezekiel. — 103

Name Index

625

Faust — hero of Goethe’s tragedy
Faust.— 330, 415, 434

Gines de Passamonte — a character in
Cervantes’ Don Quixote. — 346

Gorgon (Gr. Myth.) — one of three
snake-haired sisters, the sight of
whom turned the beholder into
stone. — 553

Habakkuk (Bib.) — a prophet. — 354

Hum, anus — a mysterious wise man and
hero in Goethe’s unfinished poem
“Die Geheimnisse”. — 415

Isaiah (Bib.) — a prophet, author of the
Book of Isaiah. — 233, 343

Jacob (Bib.) — traditional ancestor of
the people of Israel. — 104

Jacques le bonhomme (Jack the Simple-
ton)— name given to the French
peasant; see Stimer, Max

James (Bib.) — one of the twelve apos-
tles of Jesus. — 327, 331

Jehovah ( Yahweh , Yahve) (Bib.) —

principal name of God in the Old
Testament. — 108

Jeremiah (Bib.) — a prophet who in
his Lamentations mourns the de-
struction of Jerusalem. — 108

Jesus Christ (Bib.).— 154, 158, 188,
253, 381, 426, 565

Job (Bib.) — a patriarch.— 241

John (the Apostle) (Bib.) — one of the
twelve apostles of Jesus; he is re-
garded as the author of the fourth
Gospel and of the Revelation
(Apocalypse).— 128, 150, 153, 185,
222, 317, 377, 381, 431, 460

Joshua (Bib.) — leader of the Israel-
ites.— 186

Josiah (Bib.) — a prophet. — 008

Jude (Bib.) — one of the twelve apostles
of Jesus. — 103

Knight of the mirror — a character in
Cervantes’ Don Quixote ; see Schnake ,
Friedrich

Korah (Bib.) — headed an unsuccessful
revolt against Moses and perished. —
103

Luke (Bib.) — according to Christian
tradition, author of the third Gospel
and of the Acts of the Apostles. —
215, 294, 509

Malambruno — a magician, a character
in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. — 369

Malvolio — a character in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night, a rather stupid and
arrogant steward. — 106

Maritomes — a character in Cervantes’
Don Quixote; see Ddknhardt, Marie
Wilhelmine

Mark (Bib.) — according to Christian
tradition, author of the second Gos-
pel.—137, 244, 317, 377

Mary (Bib.). — 16

Matthew (Bib.) — one of the twelve
apostles of Jesus; according to Chris-
tian tradition, author of the first
Gospel.— 104, 149, 152, 162, 188,
192, 288, 327, 381, 385, 472, 483

Merlin — a soothsayer and magician in
medieval English legend. — 207, 341

Minos (Gr. Myth.) — King of Crete and
wise judge. — 520

Moor, Karl — one of the principal
characters in Schiller’s drama Die
Rduber, a high-minded robber. —
489, 562, 563, 565, 568

Moor, Karl, the Second — see Meissner,
Alfred

Moses (Bib.) — a prophet. — 110, 406,
424

Nabal (Bib.) — wealthy owner of herds
of sheep. — 158

Nante the loafer — a character in Karl
von Holtei’s play Ein Trauerspiel in
Berlin and in a popular farce “Der
Eckensteher Nante im Verhor”, a
garrulous, philosophising wag, who
seizes every opportunity to crack
stale jokes. — 272

626

Name Index

A emesis (Gr. Myth.) — goddess of

retribution. — 549, 553

Noah (Bib.) — a patriarch. — 485

Paul (Bib.) — Christian saint and apos-
tle.—142

Peter (Bib.) — one of the twelve apostles
of Jesus. — 188

Pha'ethon (Gr. Myth.) — son of Helios,
the Sun-god. — 369

Polynices (Gr. Myth.) — son of Oedipus,
King of Thebes, and brother of
Eteocles. The two brothers killed
each other fighting for power. Po-
lynices was buried by his sister An-
tigone against the command of the
new king. (This is described by
Sophocles in his tragedy Antigone .) —
137

Poseidon (Gr. Myth.) — god of the sea.
— 122,299

Rhadamanthus (Gr. Myth.) — stern and
incorruptible judge. — 484

Rudolph, Prince of Geroldstein ( Gerol -
stein) — main character of Eugene
Sue’s novel Les Mysteres de Paris. — 1 6

Sancho Panza — a character in Cer-
vantes’ Don Quixote; see Stimer, Max

Sarastro — a character in Mozart’s
opera Die Zauberflote, good magi-
cian.— 485

Schweizer — a character in Schiller’s
drama Die Rduber, an upright, hon-
est and courageous man. — 562

Sesostris — the name of three Egyptian
pharaohs of the 20th and 19th cen-
turies B.C. The Sesostris mentioned
by the Greek historians Herodotus
and Diodorus shows traits of all
three pharaohs. — 136

Solomon (Bib.) — King of Israel, reput-
ed very wise. — 310, 421, 427

Spiegelberg — a character in Schiller’s
drama Die Rduber, an inveterate
criminal devoid of all moral princi-
ples.—562

Timothy (Bib.) — according to Christian
tradition, a disciple of the Apostle
Paul.— 103

Torralva — a character in Cervantes’
Don Quixote; see Dahnhardt, Marie
Wilhelmine

Ursula, St. — legendary Christian saint.
— 283

Werther — the main character of

Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers. — 563

Zeus fGr. Myth.) — the principal god of
the Greeks. — 108

Zoroaster (or Zarathustra ) (6th cent.
B.C.) — legendary founder of the
ancient Persian religion. — 521

INDEX OF QUOTED
AND MENTIONED LITERATURE

WORKS BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS

Marx, Karl. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction
(present edition, Vol. 3)

— Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung. In: Deutsch-franzd-
sische Jahrbikher, hrsg. von Arnold Ruge und Karl Marx, 1-ste und 2-te
Lieferung, Paris, 1844. — 210, 236

On the Jewish Question (present edition, Vol. 3.)

— Zur Judenfrage, loc. cit. — 47, 197, 210, 236, 246, 514

Engels, Frederick. “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (present edition, Vol. 3)

— Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationaloekonomie. In: Deutsch-franzdsische Jahr-
bucher, hrsg. von Arnold Ruge und Karl Marx, 1-ste und 2-te Lieferung, Paris,
1844.-210

— German Socialism in Verse and Prose (present edition, Vol. 6)

— Deutscher Socialismus in Versen und Prosa. In: Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung.
Nr. 73, 74, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98; September 12 and 16, November 21, 25 and
28, December 2, 5 and 9, 1847. — 551

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism.
Against Bruno Bauer and Co. (present edition, Vol. 4)

— Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Bruno Bauer und
Consorten. Frankfurt a. M., 1845.— 15, 16, 17, 47, 98, 99, 103, 105, 107-15,
149, 212, 269, 271, 530, 542

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. Circular against Kriege (present edition, Vol. 6).

— Zirkular gegen Kriege. May 1846. — 543

WORKS BY DIFFERENT AUTHORS

Aikin, J. A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester, London,
1795.— 71

Album. Originalpoesieen von Georg Weerth, N... h... s, Friedrich Sass, H. Semmig...
Hrsg. H. Puttmann, Borna, 1847. — 569, 572-80

628

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature

Alexis, W. (W. Haring), Cabanis. Roman in 6 Biichern, Berlin, 1832. — 336
Amadis de Gaule, Lyon, 1577. — 342

Appel a la France contre la division des oppinions — see [Lourdoueix, J. -H. Baron de.]

Aristoteles. De anima libri tres. — 142

— Metaphysica. — 142

— De republica libri VIII. — 161

Arndt, E. M. Erinnerungen ans dem ausseren Leben, Leipzig, 1840. — 351
Arnim, Bettina von. Dies Buch gehort dem Konig, Bd. 1-2, Berlin, 1843. — 336

Bacon, F. De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, Londini, 1623. — 172

— The Essays or Councels, Civill and Morall, Londini, 1625. — 172

— Novum Organum, Londini, 1620. — 172

“Banquet offert par les electeurs de Lisieux a M. Guizot”. In: Journal des Debats,
July 28, 1846.— 546

Bauer, B. (anon.) “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs.” In: Wigand’s Vierteljahrs-
schrift, 1845, Bd. 3.-39, 42, 53, 56, 94, 97, 98, 101-116, 366

— Das entdeckte Christenthum. Eine Erinnerung an das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und ein
Beitrag zur Krisis des neunzehnten, Zurich und Winterthur, 1843. — 99

— Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklarung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Bd. 1-4,
Charlottenburg, 1843-45. — 57

— Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit, Zurich und Winterthur,

1842. — 97, 101

— (anon.) Hinrichs, politische Vorlesungen, Bd. 1. In: Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,
Heft I, December 1843. — 115

— Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Bd. 1, Leipzig, 1841. — 99, 11 1

— (anon.) Ludwig Feuerbach. In: Norddeutsche Blatter fur Kritik, Literatur und Unter-
haltung. Heft IV, October 1844. — 97

— (anon.) “Neueste Schriften iiber die Judenfrage.” In: Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung, Heft I, December 1843. — 114, 220

— (anon.) “Neueste Schriften iiber die Judenfrage.” In: Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung, Heft IV, March 1844.— Ill, 114

— (anon.) “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” In: Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung, Heft VIII, July 1844.— Ill, 112

Bauer, B. und Bauer, E. Denkwurdigkeiten zur Geschichte derneueren Zeit seit der Franzo-
sischen Revolution. Nach den Quellen und Original-Memoiren bearb. und hrsg. von
B. Bauer und E. Bauer, Charlottenburg, 1843-44. — 198, 210, 336

Bauer, E. Bailly und die ersten Tage der Franzosischen Revolution, Charlottenburg, 1843.
In: B. und E. Bauer, Denkwurdigkeiten zur Geschichte der neueren Zeit seit der
Franzosischen Revolution, Bd. 4. — 336

— Die liberalen Bestrebungen in Deutschland, Heft 1-2, Zurich und Winterthur,

1843. — 336

Bayrhoffer, K. Th. Die Idee und Geschichte der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1838. — 182

Beaulieu, C.-F. Essais historiques sur les Causes et les Effets de la Revolution de France, Paris,
1801-03.-178

Beck, K. Auferstehung. In: Gedichte von Karl Beck, Berlin, 1846. — 567

Becker, A. Die Volksphilosophie unserer Tage, Neumiinster, 1843. — 323, 336

— (anon.) Vorwort zu [Kuhlmann, Georg] Die Neue Welt oder das Reich des Geistes
auf Erden. Verkiindigung, Genf, 1845.— 531, 532, 533, 536, 537

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature

629

Becker, N. Der deutsche Rhein. In: Gedichte von Nicolaus Becker, Koln, 1841. — 57
Beranger, P.-J. de. Les infiniment petits, ou la gerontocratie. — 514
The Bible.— 120, 336

Books of the Old Testament
Genesis— 104, 110, 406
Exodus — 388, 424
Joshua — 186

1 Samuel— 158

2 Kings— 304
Job — 242
Psalms— 118, 183
Isaiah — 233, 344
Jeremiah — 108
Ezekiel — 103
Habakkuk — 355

Books of the New Testament

Matthew— 104, 137, 149, 153, 162, 188, 192, 288, 328, 381, 385, 472, 483
Mark— 137, 244, 320, 377
Luke— 215, 294, 365, 509

John— 121, 124, 128, 150, 153, 272, 317, 460, 565
The Acts of the Apostles — 122
Romans— 1 14, 162, 193, 201, 241, 339

1 Corinthians— 107, 122, 157, 192

2 Corinthians — 144, 163
Galatians— 103, 130, 251, 253
Ephesians — 185, 553
Colossians — 109

2 Timothy — 103
Hebrews — 137
James — 327,331
1 Peter— 188, 503
1 John— 103,381
Jude— 103

Revelation of St. John— 104, 144, 147, 185, 222, 431

Bibliothek politischer Reden aus dem 18. und 1 9. Jahrhundert [Rutenberg, Adolf. (Hrsg.)],
Bd. 1-6, Berlin, 1843-44.— 336

Blanc, L. Histoire de dix ans. 1830-1840, T. 1-5, Paris, 1841-44.— 336, 493, 508

— Geschichte der zehn Jahre 1830-1840. Aus dem Franzosischen iibersetzt von
L. Buhl. I-V. Berlin, 1844-45.— 197

[Bluntschli, J. C.] Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz nach den bei Weitling vorgefundenen Pa-
pieren. Wortlicher Abdruck des Kommissionalberichtes an die H. Regierung des Standes
Zurich, Zurich, 1843.— 210, 217, 323, 336

Boisguillebert, P. Le Detail de la France. La Cause de la diminution de ses biens, etlafacilitedu
remede. In: Economistes-Financiers du XVIII siecle, Paris, 1843. — 197

— Dissertation sur la nature des richesses de I’argent et des tributs, ou Von decouvre la fausse
idee qui regne dans le monde a I’egard de ces trots articles. In: Economistes-Financiers du
XVIII siecle, Paris, 1843.— 197

— Factum de la France. In: Economistes-Financiers du XVIII siecle, Paris, 1843. — 197

630

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature

— Traite de la nature, culture, commerce et interet des Grains tant par rapport au public
qu’a toutes les conditions d’un Etat. In: Economistes-Financiers du XVIII siecle, Paris,
1843.-197

Bonald [,L.-G.-A.]. Oeuvres completes, 12 vol., Paris, 1817-19. — 346

Bossuet, J.-B. Politique tiree des propres Paroles de I’Ecriture-Sainte, Bruxelles, 1710. — 522

Brissot [,J.-P.]. Memoires de Brissot ... sur ses Contemporains, et la Revolution Frangaise.
Publies par son fils; avec des Notes et des Eclaircissemens historiques par M. F. de
Montrol, Vol. 1-2, Paris, 1830. — 198

Browning, G. The Domestic and Financial Condition of Great Britain ; preceded by a Brief
Sketch of her Foreign Policy; and of the statistics and politics of France, Russia, Aus-
tria and Prussia, London, 1834. — 181

Burger, G. A. Lenore. — 573

Qa ira (French revolutionary song). — 53

Cabet [,E.]. Ma ligne droite ou le vrai chemin du salut pour le peuple, Paris, 1841. — 462

— Refutation des doctrines de V Atelier, Paris, 1842. — 226, 227

— Voyage en Icarie, roman philosophique et social, Paris, 1842. — 461, 519-29

Caesar, Gaius Julius. Commentarii de bello Gallico. — 444
Calderon, P. de la Barca. La puente de Mantible. — 450
Camoes, Luis de. Lusiada. — 428, 429
Carmagnole (French revolutionary song). — 53, 484

Carriere, M. Der Kolner Dom als freie deutsche Kirche. Gedanken uber Nationality, Kunst
und Religion beim Wiederbeginn des Baues, Stuttgart, 1843. — 336

Cervantes Saavedra, M. de. Vida y hechos del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Brucelas, 1617.— 207, 221, 222, 233, 235, 238-39, 270-71, 272, 274-75, 282-83, 307,
341-42, 344, 369, 400, 423, 443, 444, 450

Chamisso, A. von. Tragische Geschichte. In: Adelbert von Chamisso’s Werke, Bd. 3, Gedich-
te, Leipzig, 1836. — 318

Chastellux [,F.-J. de], De la Felicite publique, ou Considerations sur le sort des hommes dans
les differentes epoques de I’histoire. Nouv. ed., augm. de notes inedites de Voltaire,
T 1, Paris, 1822.— 461

Cherbuliez, A.-E. Riche ou Pauvre. Exposition succincte des Causes et des Effets de la Distri-
bution actuelle des Richesses sociales, Paris-Geneve, 1840. — 86

Chevalier, M. Cours d’economie politique fait au College de France, Bruxelles, 1845. — 509

— Lettres sur I’Amerique du Nord, T. 1-2, Paris, 1836. — 303

Child, J. Traites sur le commerce et sur les avantages qui resuitent de la reduction d’interest
de I’argent, Amsterdam et Berlin, 1754. — 197

Churoa, A. L. von. Kritische Darstellung der Socialtheorie Fourier’s, Braunschweig,
1840.— 510

Clemens Alexandrinus. Stromatum libri VIII. In: Opera graece et latine quae extant,
Coloniae, 1688. — 142

Comte, Ch. Traite de legislation ou Exposition des lois generates suivant lesquelles les peuples
prosperent, deperissent ou restent stationnaires, Bruxelles, 1837. — 308

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature

631

Constant-Rebecque, B. de. De Vesprit de conquete et de I’usurpation, dans leurs rapports avec
la civilisation europeenne, 3-ed., Paris, 1814. — 347

Cooper, Th. Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, 2nd ed., London, 1831 . — 392,
489

Courier, P.-L. Oeuvres completes , 4 vol., Paris, 1829-30. — 464
De la Felicite.... — see [Chastellux, F. J. de]

Destutt de Tracy [.A.-L.-C.]. Elemens d’Ideologie. IV-e et V-e parties. Traite de la Volonte
et de ses Effets, Paris, 1826. — 228

Deux amis de la liberte — see [Kerverseau, Fr. Marie et Clavelin, G.]

Dezamy, Th. Code de la Communaute, Paris, 1842. — 526
Dictionnaire de lAcademie Fran$aise, vol. 1-2, Bruxelles, 1835. — 306

Diogenes Laertius. De clarorum philosophorum vitis, dogmatibus et apophihegmatibus libri
decern. — 1 39-40

Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere annee. 1828-29, Troisieme ed.,
Bruxelles, 1831.— 505, 506

Dronke, E. Berlin, Bd. 1-2, Frankfurt a. M., 1846.— 572

— Polizei-Geschichten, Leipzig, 1846. — 570, 571

— Aus dem Volk, Frankfurt a. M., 1846.— 572

Duchatel [, Ch. M. T.]. De la Charite dans ses rapports avec I’etat moral et le bien-etre des
classes inferieures de la societe, Paris, 1829. — 359

Dunoyer, Ch. De la liberte du travail, ou simple expose des conditions dans lesquelles les forces
humaines s’exercent avec le plus de puissance, T. 1-2, Paris, 1845. — 63

Eck, K. Waldfrevel. In: Album, Originalpoesieen.... Hrsg. H. Piittmann, Boma,
1847.— 575

Eden, F. M. The State of the Poor: or, an History of the Labouring Classes in England, from
the conquest to the present period ; Vols. 1-3. London, 1797. — 220

Edmonds, Th. R. Practical Moral and Political Economy; or, the Government, Religion,
and Institutions, most Conducive to Individual Happiness and to National Power,
London, 1828. — 461

Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz. Hrsg. von Georg Herwegh, 2-te Aufl. Glarus,
1844.— 201, 209, 336, 459, 466, 483, 486, 491, 492, 529

Encyclopedic, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, par une Societe de
Gens de Lettres, T. 5, Paris, 1755. — 524

[Enfantin, B.-P.] Economie politique et Politique. Articles extraits du “< Globe ”, Paris,
1831.— 508

Ewald, J. L. Der gute Jungling, gute Gatte und Vater, oder Mittel, um es zu werden. Ein Ge-
genstuck zu der Kunst, ein gutes Madchen zu werden, Bd. 1-2, Frankfurt a. M.,
1804.— 122

Ewerbeck, H. Lied. In: Album. Originalpoesieen.... Hrsg. H. Piittmann, Borna,
1847.— 577

— Schlachtlied, ibid. — 577

Fatouville, N. de. Arlequin, empereur dans la lune. In: Gherarch. Theatre italien,
Vol. 1.— 430

22—2086

632

Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature

Faucher, J. Englische Tagesfragen. In: Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VII-IX, June-
August 1844. — 110

Feuerbach, L. Geschichte der neuem Philosophie. Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der
Leibnitz’schen Philosophie, Ansbach, 1837. — 98

— Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft, Zurich und Winterthur, 1843. — 1 1,12, 58,
101, 192, 467

— (anon.) “Zur Kritik der ‘positiven Philosophie’”. In: Hallische Jahrbiicher fiir
deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, Nr. 289-293, 1838. — 98

— Pierre Bayle. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Menschheit, Ansbach,
1838.— 98

— (anon.) “Ueber das ‘Wesen des Christenthums’ in Beziehung auf den ‘Einzigen
und sein Eigen thum’ ” . In: Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Bd. 2. — 56, 97,
104, 445

— Vorlaufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie. In: Anekdota zur neuesten
deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik von Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Fried-
rich Koppen, Karl Nauwerck, Arnold Ruge und einigen Ungenannten, hrsg.
von Arnold Ruge, Bd. I-II, Zurich und Winterthur, 1843. — 160, 192

— Das Wesen des Christenthums, Leipzig, 1841. — 3, 6, 11, 98, 237, 490

— Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luther’s. Ein Beitrag zum Wesen des Christen-
thums, Leipzig, 1844. — 13

Fievee, J. Correspondance politique et administrative, commencee au Mois de Mai 1814, et
dediee a M. le Comte de Blacas d’Aulps, Part 1 — [15], Paris, 1815-[1819]. — 346

Fourier, Ch. La fausse Industrie, Paris, 1835. — 206

— Le nouveau monde industriel et societaire ou invention du procede d’industrie
attrayante et naturelle distribute en series passionnees, Paris, 1829. — 481

— Des trois unites extemes. In: La Phalange, 1845, 14 Annee, 1-re Serie, T. 1. — 144,
236

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22*

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Volker in Liedem. Gesammelt von Johann Gottfried von Herder, Stuttgart und
Berlin: Cotta n. d. — 541

Weydemeyer, J. Die Werkstatt; redigirt von Georg Schirges. In: Das Westphalische
Dampfboot, Jg. 2, September, 1846. — 543

Woeniger, A. Th. Publicistische Abhandlungen. Th. 1. Die Grande des wachsenden
Pauperismus. 2 Aufl. Berlin, 1843. — 220, 232

DOCUMENTS

Code Napoleon. — 146, 339, 362, 526
Corpus juris civilis. — 90, 364

Declaration des droits de I’homme et du citoyen. 1793. — 402

Leges Liciniae Sextiae. — 33

Lex duodecim tabularum. — 318

Magna Charta Libertatum. — 353

Tabula Amalphitana. — 91

ANONYMOUS ARTICLES AND REPORTS
PUBLISHED IN PERIODIC EDITIONS

Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Heft VI, Mai, 1844: Correspondent aus der Provinz. — 108
Blatter der Zukunft. Nr. 5, 1846: Politischer und socialer Umschwung. — 206, 216
Democratic pacifique. Le 29 octobre, 1846: Les Calamites publiques. — 548

Le 31 octobre, 1846: Des moyens de prevenir les inondations. —
548

Le 1 novembre, 1846: Le budget, Vadministration des travaux
publics et les inondations. — 548

Le 4 novembre, 1846: Inondation. — Responsabilite de VAdmini-
stration. — 548

Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz. Hrsg. von G. Herwegh. 2 Aufl. Glarus, 1844:
Preussen seit der Einsetzung Arndt’s bis zur Absetzung Bauer’s. — 201

Journal des debats politiques et litteraires. Le 4 mars, 1847: Sur le reboisement des montagnes
et la conservation du sol forestier. — 544

L’Organisateur. No. 40,(lre annee) le 19 Mai, 1830: A un Catholique, sur la vie et le
caractere de St. -Simon. — 493

La Reforme. Le 5 novembre, 1846: Responsabilite du gouvemement. Suite (1). — 548
Trier’sche Zeitung, 12 Januar, 1847: [Note on the weekly Veilchen]. — 559
Das Westphalische Dampfboot, Jg. 1, Mai, 1845: Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kriti-
schen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten. Von F. Engels und K. Marx. Frankfurt,
1845. — 15-17, 95, 113, 542 1

Jg. 2. Oktober, 1846: Humanismus-Kommunismus. — 548
Jg. 2. Oktober, 1846: Die franzosische Bettler-Monarchie des
siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. — 548

Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift. 1845, Bd. 4: Ueber das Recht des Freigesprochenen, eine
Ausfertigung des wider ihn ergangenen Erkenntnisses zu verlangen. — 30, 101

INDEX OF PERIODICALS

Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung — a monthly of the Young Hegelians edited by Bruno
Bauer; it was published in Charlottenburg from December 1843 to. October
844.-108, 110, 111, 115, 220, 269, 302

Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Zeitung — a daily, semi-official organ of the Prussian
Government in the 1840s; published in Berlin from 1819. — 570

Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophic und Publicistik — a two-volume collection
published in Switzerland (Zurich and Winterthur) in 1843; it was edited by Arnold
Ruge. Among its contributors were Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig
Feuerbach.— 160, 192, 336

L' Atelier, organe special de la classe laborieuse, redige par des ouvriers exclusivement — a
monthly, organ of artisans and workers who were influenced by the ideas of

Christian socialism; published in Pan- from 1840 to 1850. — 227

Blatter der Zukunft — a German-language journal published in Paris from August 1845
to March or April 1846 by Hermann Ewerbeck, organ of German workers and
artisans living in France; five issues were published. — 206, 216

Biirgerbuch — see Deutsches Biirgerbuch

Le Charivari — a satirical newspaper of a republican trend, published in Paris from
1832 to 1893.— 164, 545

Le Constitutional — a daily newspaper; during the 1840s it was the organ of the
moderate Orleanists; it was published in Paris from 1815 to 1870. — 546

Corsaire — see Le Corsaire-Satan

Le Corsaire-Satan — a satirical newspaper published under this title in Paris from 1844
to 1847.— 547, 548

Debats — see Journal des Debats politiques et litteraires

La Democratic pacifique — a daily newspaper, organ of the Fourierists, published in
Paris from 1843 to 1851 under the editorship of Victor Considerant. — 462, 548

Deutsche Jahrbiicher fiir Wissenschaft und Kunst — a Young Hegelian literary and
philosophical journal published in Leipzig from July 1841 under the editorship of

Arnold Ruge. Earlier (1838-41) it appeared under the title Hallische Jahrbiicher fur
deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst (see). In January 1843 the journal was closed down

642

Index of Periodicals

by the Saxon Government and prohibited throughout Germany by order of the
Federal Diet. — 56, 112

Deutsches Burgerbuch — a yearbook, organ of the “true socialists”, published by
Hermann Piittmann; Deutsches Burgerbuch fur 1845 came out in Darmstadt in
December 1844, and Deutsches Burgerbuch fur 1846 in Mannheim in the summer of
1846. Engels contributed two articles to the yearbook. — 459, 460, 483, 486, 491,
492, 529, 556

Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher — a yearbook edited by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge
and published in German in Paris. Only the first issue, a double one, came out in
February 1844; it contained several articles by Marx and Engels. — 47, 197, 205, 209,
236, 247, 336, 514

Dies Buch gehort dem Volke^- a yearbook published by Otto Liming in Bielefeld in
1845 and 1846, and in Paderborn in 1847; organ of the “true socialists”. — 541

Le Drapeau blanc — a newspaper published in Paris from 1819 to 1827 and in 1829-30;
an organ of the ultra-royalist party. — 346

L’Egalitaire. Journal de l’ organisation sociale — a monthly founded by Theodore Dezamy
and published in Paris in 1840; it propagated the ideas of utopian com-
munism.— 206

L’Epoque. Journal complet et universel — a newspaper published in Paris in 1845-47,
organ of the moderate conservatives. — 547

La Fratemite. Journal moral et politique — a communist workers’ monthly, published in
Paris from 1841 to 1843.— 216

La Gazette de France — a royalist daily; published under this tide in Paris from 1762 to
1792 and from 1797 to 1848.— 346

Gesellschaftsspiegel. Organ zur Vertretung der besitzlosen Volksklassen und zur Beleuchtung
der gesellschaftlichen Zustdnde der Gegenwart — a monthly journal of the “true
socialists”; it was edited by Moses Hess and published in Elberfeld in 1845-46;
altogether twelve issues appeared. Frederick Engels was one of the founders of the
journal.— 17, 542, 549, 552, 553

Le Globe — a daily newspaper founded by Pierre Leroux and published in Paris from
1824 to 1831; from January 1831 it was the organ of the Saint-Simonists. — 506, 509

Die Grenzboten. Zeitschrift fur Politik und Literatur — a liberal weekly journal published
in Leipzig from 1841. — 568, 569

Hallische Jahrbiicher fur deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst — a literary and philosophical
journal of the Young Hegelians; it was edited by Arnold Ruge and others and
published in Halle from 1838 to 1841. From July 1841 to January 1843 it appeared
under the title Deutsche Jahrbiicher fur Wissenschaft und Kunst (see). — 56, 98,- 508

Historisch-politische Zeitschrift — a conservative journal edited by Leopold Ranke,
published in Hamburg in 1832 and in Berlin from 1833 to 1836. — 301

L’Instruction sociale — see Journal d’instruction sociale

Journal des Debats politiques et litteraires — a daily newspaper founded in Paris in 1789,
expressed the views of the government during the July monarchy. — 546

Index of Periodicals

643

Journal d’instruction sociale — a weekly published by Condorcet, Sieyes and Duhamel
in Paris from June 1 to July 6, 1793; organ of the Girondists. — 527

Kolnische Zeitung — a daily published under this title from 1802 to 1945; organ of the
liberal bourgeoisie. — 54 1

Koniglich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats-und gelehrten Sachen — a daily
newspaper published in Berlin from 1785; also known as the Vossische Zeitung
after its owner. — 331, 335, 336, 371

Liter atur- Zeitung — see Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung

Le Moniteur Universel — a daily newspaper published under this title in Paris from
1789 to 1901; from 1799 to 1869 it was an official government organ. — 336

Le National — a daily newspaper published in Paris from 1830 to 1851; in the 1840s it
was the organ of the moderate republicans. — 547, 548

Norddeutsche Blatter fur Kritik, Literatur und Unterhaltung — a monthly published in
Berlin in 1844 and 1845.— 97, 270, 366

L’Organisateur, journal des progres de la science generate — a Saint-Simonist weekly
published in Paris from 1829 to 1831. — 493, 506

La Phalange. Revue de la science social — a Fourierist journal published in Paris from
1832 to 1849; its title, frequency of publication and size were changed several
times. — 236

Le ' Point du jour , ou Resultat de ce qui s’est passe la veille a VAssemblee nationale — a daily
newspaper published in Paris from June 19, 1789, to October 21, 1791, by Bertrand
Barere; it reported the debates in the French National Assembly. — 199

Le Populaire de 1841. Journal de reorganisation sociale et politique — a journal edited by
Etienne Cabet; published in Paris from 1841 to 1850. — 462

La Presse — a daily newspaper published in Paris from 1836; in the 1840s organ of the
opposition. — 546

Le Producteur. Journal philosophique de VIndustrie, de la Science et des Beaux Arts — a
weekly published in Paris from 1825 to 1826, the first periodical publication of the
Saint-Simonists . — 506

La Reforme — a daily, organ of the republican democrats and petty-bourgeois social-
ists, published in Paris from 1843 to 1850. — 548

Revolutions de Paris — a revolutionary-democratic weekly, published in Paris from July
1789 to February 1794; until September 1790 it was edited by Elisee Lous-
talot.— 380

Revue des deux Mondes — a literary and political fortnightly journal published in Paris
from 1829.— 509

Rheinische Jahrbucher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform — an organ of the “true socialists”,
published by Hermann Piittmann. Only two volumes were issued: the first in
Darmstadt in August 1845, the second in Belle-Vue, on the German-Swiss border,
at the end of 1846; Engels’ “Speeches in Elberfeld” were .published in this
periodical.— 458, 459-83, 491, 514, 529, 554, 555, 556, 558

Rheinischer Beobachter — a conservative daily newspaper published in Cologne from
1844 until the beginning of 1848. — 542

644

Index of Periodicals

Rheinische Zeitung fur Politik, Handel und Gewerbe — a daily newspaper published in
Cologne from January 1, 1842, to March 31, 1843. It was founded by members of
the Rhenish bourgeoisie who were opposed to Prussian absolutism. Marx was one of
its editors from October 15, 1842, to March 17, 1843. Under his influence the
newspaper assumed a pronounced revolutionary-democratic character, and this led
to its suppression by the Prussian Government. Engels was one of the contributors
to this paper. — 112

Sachsische Vaterlands-Blatter — a liberal newspaper published in Dresden from 1837,
and in Leipzig from 1841. — 336

Trier’sche Zeitung — a daily founded in 1757 and published under this title from 1815;
the newspaper propagated radical views in the early 1840s, it came later under the
influence of the “true socialists”. — 541, 559, 573

Veilchen. Harmlose Blatter fur die modeme Kritik — a weekly paper of the “true
socialists”, it was edited by G. Schliissel and published in Bautzen (Saxony) in 1846
and 1847.— 559, 560, 576

Der Volks-Tribun. Organ des Jungen Amerika — a German-language weekly newspaper
founded by “true socialists” in New York, published from January 5 to December
31, 1846; its editor was Hermann Kriege. — 543, 552

Vonuarts! Pariser Deutsche Zeitschrift — a German-language newspaper published in
Paris twice a week from January to December 1844; at first it was the organ of the
moderate section of German emigrants and from May 1844 of their radical and
democratic section. Marx and Engels, who collaborated in the production of this
journal, strengthened its revolutionary tendencies. When Marx and several other
contributors were expelled from France by the Guizot Government the paper
ceased publication. — 528

Vossische Zeitung — see Koniglich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats-und
gelehrten Sachen

Die Werkstatt. Eine Monatszeitschrift fur Arbeiter — a “true socialist” monthly journal
published in Hamburg from 1845 to 1847 and edited by Georg Schirges. — 543

Weser-Dampfboot — a radical journal which gradually became an organ of the “true
socialists”; it was published in Minden from January to October 1844 twice a week
and in November and December once a month. In November Otto Luning became
a co-editor. At the end of 1844 the journal was suppressed by the government; in
1845 it reappeared under the title Das Westphalische Dampfboot (see). — 542

Das Westphalische Dampfboot — a monthly journal, organ of the “true socialists”; it was
edited by Otto Luning and published in Bielefeld from January 1845 to December
1846, and in Paderborn from January 1847 to March 1848, Joseph Weydemeyer
took part in the editing of this journal. Marx and Engels contributed several articles
to this journal.— 15, 16, 17, 95, 112, 541-43, 547, 548

Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift — a Young Hegelian philosophical journal published by
Otto Wigand in Leipzig in 1844 and 1845. Among its contributors were Bruno
Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. — 15-17, 41, 56, 57, 94-95, 98, 101,
106, 115, 143, 144, 150, 156, 158, 159, 166, 173, 183, 197, 205, 207, 224, 234, 236,
246, 248, 251, 257, 264, 270, 280, 298, 299, 339, 366, 372, 373, 384, 415, 425, 436,
451

SUBJECT INDEX

Abolition ( Aufhebung ) — 47-48, 49, 50,

51, 64, 77, 78-80, 205, 218
Abstraction— 3-5, 29, 83, 87, 155, 175,

183, 326, 510, 517, 534

— and reality — 99, 229-30, 281, 284,
291, 293, 302, 305-06, 362, 417,
430, 458, 464, 469, 538

— and history — 29, 37, 50, 61, 89,
130, 138, 144, 172, 302, 511, 532

— abstract and concrete — 317, 430,
469, 503

— as a characteristic feature of ideal-
ism, metaphysics and religion —
99, 116, 159, 171, 176, 196, 262-
63, 281-82, 305-06, 510, 534, 538

— mystification of the dialectics of the
abstract and the concrete in the
philosophy of Hegel and his fol-
lowers—89, 98-99, 100, 105, 130,
138, 172, 174, 175, 193, 237, 251,
317, 414, 468, 469, 481

— abstract categories, concepts — 41,
275, 362, 447

— abstract theory, science — 458,498-
99

— abstract thinking — 4, 7, 263-64
Accumulation — 63, 68, 69, 79, 86

Activity of people — 4, 7, 50-52, 55, 64, 74,

— as a premise of human history —
31, 36-37

— basic aspects of social activity —
41-45, 50

— material, productive, practical —
3-8, 35-37, 40-41, 45-46, 63, 82

— spiritual, mental, theoretical — 3, 6,
45, 63, 82

— estrangement of social activity —
47-48, 52

See also Intercourse, Labour, Practice,
Production, Self-activity
Aesthetics — 485
Afghanistan — 546

Agriculture — 32-34, 38, 63, 69, 75, 390
Alexandrian school of philosophy — 142

Alienation ( estrangement ) — 46-53, 76-80,
88, 230, 245, 281-82, 301, 350, 396,
486

— religious self-alienation — 4, 7, 159
See also Activity of people

America

— discovery of — 50, 70
— Indians — 225

— South America — 80
Analogy — 475, 480, 530

Analysis — 5, 8, 57
Anatomy — 440
Ancient Egypt— 55, 136
Ancient Greece — 34, 83, 138-43, 187,
251, 347, 417, 512

Ancient Greek philosophy — 136-43, 154,
417, 512

See also Alexandrian school of philosophy.

646

Subject Index

Cyrenaic school, Epicureanism, Neo-
Platonism, Scepticism, Sophistry, Stoicism
Ancient Rome— 33-34, 40, 84-85, 89,
90-91, 137, 140, 141-43, 187, 277,
318, 358, 363, 390
Ancient society — 33-34, 84, 89-90, 92
Ancient World— 33-34, 40, 67, 83-85,
89-90, 92, 136, 137, 138-44, 189, 432
See also Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome
Animal

— and man — 31, 44, 161
Antithesis — see Opposition
Appearance, illusion — 28, 30, 36-37, 39,
46-47, 55, 60-61, 74, 78, 83, 87, 90-91,
127, 130, 141-42, 154, 184, 195, 222,
242, 246-47, 264, 266, 267, 275, 278,
279, 281-84, 297, 298, 300, 316, 334,
397

Aristocracy — 46, 59, 60, 221, 342
Arithmetic — 156
Art— 66-67, 92, 394
Asceticism — 417, 419
Association — 78, 354, 361, 414-15
Astronomy— 394, 540-42, 548-49, 553,
555-56, 560-61, 570, 573, 574
Atheism — 141-42, 300
Atom — 139, 141, 283, 459

Babouvism — 210, 226, 461, 553
Banker — 85, 384
Banks — 72

— Bank of England — 411
Barbarians — 34, 67, 84, 225, 342
Barbarism (epoch) — 33, 64
Basis and superstructure — 35-37, 48, 50,
53-54, 81-82, 89, 329-30, 373, 412-
13, 462, 550
Being

— and consciousness — 24, 35-37,

43-45, 128-29, 246, 250-51, 262,
287-89, 330, 429, 434

— and essence — 13, 58, 77, 264,
511-12

— actual being — 49, 82, 269, 283

— being determines consciousness
36-37

Belgium — 360
Berlin — 361, 572
Bible— 120, 534

Bills of exchange — 399
Botany — 440, 461

Bourgeoisie— 73, 76-77, 221-23, 229,
410-14

— big — 70, 71

_ petty — 70, 71, 217, 230, 271, 303,
378, 381, 417, 469-70
See also Bourgeoisie in England, Bour-
geoisie in France, Bourgeoisie in Germa-
ny, Bourgeoisie in the Netherlands, Bour-
geois society. Capital, Capitalist, Civil
society, Classes, Competition, Family,
Interests, Landed property, Law, Private
property. State, Working class
Bourgeoisie in England — 119, 193, 196,
200, 249, 411-12, 455, 546, 557
Bourgeoisie in France — 61, 119, 193, 195,
196, 200, 335, 351, 409-12, 455, 520,
557

Bourgeoisie in Germany — 23, 112, 119,
129, 193-96, 200, 201, 237, 314-15,
411, 430, 457, 557

Bourgeoisie in the Netherlands — 194, 411
Bourgeois political economy — 86, 229-30,
392, 409, 412-13
— Physiocrats — 409, 412

— classical (Smith, Ricardo) — 72,
392, 403

— vulgar (Senior) — 360

— petty-bourgeois — 373
Bourgeois society — 52-53, 72-74, 78-79,

80, 88-89, 181-82, 200, 213, 250, 256,
290, 348, 354, 361, 363, 408, 409,
415-16, 430, 513, 550
Bureaucracy (officialdom) — 195, 225,

348

Brain, human — 36, 537
Bremen — 194
Byzantium — 204

Cabetism (Cabet’s system) — 226, 461,
462, 519-29

Capital— 34, 49, 50, 54, 63, 64-65, 66.

68-70, 72-73, 77, 85-86, 89, 91, 93
Capitalist — 40, 69, 74, 408
See also Bourgeoisie
Carthage — 83
Caste system — 5 5

Subject Index

647

Categorical imperative — 254, 292
Categories— 29, 53, 58, 126, 301-02, 317
Catholicism — 170
Cattle-raising — 33, 89
Cause— 65, 66, 75, 84, 86, 136, 154, 162,
181, 187, 205, 219, 269, 351-52, 395-
97, 304-05, 464, 467, 547, 558

— cause and effect — 63, 175, 283,

304, 305, 352, 370, 376, 416-17,

447, 462, 465, 508

Celts— 364

Chance — see Necessity and chance
Chartism — 207, 217, 226, 461, 466, 566
Chemistry— 27, 40, 110, 141, 186-87
China — 51, 165, 369
Christianity— 30, 136-37, 143-44, 145-
46, 151, 152, 153, 154, 188, 189, 211,
220, 254, 304, 449, 510
Church — 170-71, 557
Circulation — 66, 68, 70, 72, 73
Civilisation — 63-64, 84, 181, 204, 205,
342, 388, 531, 538

Civil society — 5, 8, 42, 49-50, 53, 89-90,
342

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